Configurative Urbanism: The Forgotten Theory for Our Urban Future

Configurative Planning Process, a design method developed by Aldo van Eyck, belongs to the structuralist movement of Dutch architecture in the 1950s and 1960s. With Aldo van Eyck working as a theoretician and Piet Blom as a designer, both of them clearly realized the imperfections of modernist architecture and new cities. They were trying to design architectural structures based on the life of the vital community. They focused on the social and cultural aspects of urban environments. In this sense, their projects can provide us with great inspiration in our effort to design sustainable cities.

This article reviews the configurative design method and the possibilities for its application in current architectural and urban planning practice. In this point of view, the configurative design process is examined as an inspiration for dealing with some problems of rapid urbanization in China, but not only there.