The question of creation and invention in urban design has been little problematised in the historiography of architecture and urbanism. In architectural history, creation and invention are mostly considered as the result of the conceptual work of architects and urban designers, or in other words, as the outcome of a projected intention to produce new artefacts. Architectural history, close to traditional art history, is preoccupied with retracing the creation of the work as part of a generative process of one person whose work is then in turn seen as part of a process over several generations. In this vision, the intention of the author (or architect) and his conceptual work coincide in an almost perfect way as both sides of the same coin.

This assumes that the work is a conscious production of the author and sees it as being the immediate reflection of the author’s ideas, and therefore a transparent and readable text composed of aesthetic conceptions, ideological visions, citations, and most of all, of conscious design choices. In its epistemological approach, this historiography usually pays attention to facts that can be easily (and positively) retraced, like styles, formal rules, schools and education, building techniques, affiliations to associations and movements, trends, manifestos, etc., though the question of the creative work of architects and urban designers becomes more complex if we take into account the representational aspect. Representation by drawings, photographs, maps, etc. accompanies the activity of conceiving ...

Pieter Uyttenhove

(born 1957) is full professor of urban planning at the department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent University, Belgium, and is currently head of department. He was educated as an engineer-architect at the University of Leuven, as an urbanist at the Institut d'Urbanisme de Paris, and did his Ph.D at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Doctoral research is being done under his direction on historical and theoretical urban planning matters as urban network development; national road development; the development of landscape imagery; the interaction between urban planning, landscape and heritage; the architecture of information. He is the director of Labo S, a research laboratory for urban design and urban planning. In the last 5 years, Labo S did research for public authorities on different levels on ‘new landscapes’ in (sub)urbanized areas; regional identity in a changing world; landscape transformation through chronophotographic studies; a contemporary and urbanistic approach of architectural, landscape and urban heritage and made a landscape-atlas on municipal and regional level of the Scheldt-valley between Antwerp and Ghent dealing with natural, hydraulic, cultural, economic, etc. matters. He was founder and chairman of Studio Open City, a cross-institutional cultural platform for urban design. Formerly he was joint-curator of the drawing collection of the Académie d’Architecture in Paris and co-ordinator of the architectural program of Antwerp European Cultural Capital. Since 2002 he is co-director of GUST (Ghent Urban Studies Team). He is the author of several books and many articles in international reviews. He is the editor of the recently published, Recollecting landscapes : herfotografie, geheugen en transformatie: 1904-1980-2004. He recently was one of the organizers of the international colloquium on Analogous Spaces. In 2009, he published a book on Marcel Lods. Action, architecture, histoire, at Verdier (Paris).