It was 2011 when I first met Alexandros Washburn. He was a lecturer at a seminar in Sao Paulo and I sat at the audience, mesmerized by his ability to explain in such a simplistic manner my everyday life as an urban designer working for the public sector. He presented us his three “bosses” – Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses – and didactically went through the complexities of our job. He inspired many professionals that day – including me.

I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to meet Washburn another time when I took him to visit the slum upgrading works in Paraisópolis. It was when I first saw the manuscript of The Nature of Urban Design: a New York perspective on resilience and, since that day, I had been anxiously waiting for it to be published, as I really wanted to learn more about his theories and findings, which he so enthusiastically talks about.

Washburn has accomplished to transfer into written language the same atmosphere he produces in his speech – an enormous amount of knowledge accumulated from both theory and practice, filled with good sense. One may argue that this is the best kind of knowledge urban designers should look for. The book is simply a must-read for every architect and urban designer.

Alexandros Washburn received his Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the early 1990´s, as a young architect dissatisfied that his chosen profession seemed incapable of improving his city, Washington D.C., the author became public works advisor for the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his mentor. From that job post, he moved to New York and became the president of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation, a project close to the senator´s heart which, unfortunately, he would never see accomplished.

Having been design principal at W Architecture and Landscape Architecture LLC from 2001 to 2006, he has won national awards in urban design, architecture and landscape architecture, including New York's prestigious Public Architect Award. After that, Washburn occupied the post of Chief Urban Designer in the New York City Department of City Planning during 7 years. The projects under his coordination ranged in scale from zoning, building codes and policy to best-practice design guidelines, blending architecture, urban design and governance. 
Currently at the Stevens Institute of Technology, he is the founding director of the Center for Coastal Resilience and Urban Xcellence (CRUX). Involved in the recovery effort of Red Hook, Brooklyn, the author became personally motivated having had his own house hit by Hurricane Sandy. Increasing urban coastal resilience to extreme events caused by climate change, while simultaneously improving their quality of life, has become his main dedication. 
The Nature of Urban Design: a New York perspective on resilience, was launched in October 2013, published by Island Press. As the author describes, the book has been written “out of sense of self-preservation” as he found himself struggling with the role of convincing very powerful people to implement “what he instinctively knew was the right thing to do”. That is when his survival technique comes into place: the author exercised his communication and persuasion skills putting into writing what he knew were the best solutions for the common interest. Advocacy can be just as important as technical knowledge.

In its 240 pages, he describes how disappointing the urban design process can be and how rare real transformation takes place. He calls out urban designers to understand this process and play their roles actively, smartly: no room for naïveté. 
The author brilliantly profiles the urban designer – the strengths to be acknowledged and weaknesses to be overcome. The challenges of the ones who – just like him and me – come from the architectural background and need to forcelly adjust to the new processes and scales of urban design. This becomes an even bigger challenge in countries like Brazil where there are no separate curriculums for each profession in the university and education ignores and flattens their differences.
 
The Nature of Urban Desing is divided into five chapters which approach the following themes: why we should care about cities, the process and the products of urban design, the High Line as a case study and resilience (although this final subject is inserted throughout the text, clearly demonstrating his current focus). Urban design is shown as the art of changing cities: “urban designers do not change cities; they design the tools that change cities”. A lesson to be remembered as, too often, urban designers who master their design skills fail to take the role of negotiators in the process, since they are not usually huge fans of politics and finances and cannot assume an equal position when fighting for their beliefs. 
This publication is a treatise to urban design, focusing on its mission: to change our cities while improving the quality of public life. The term ‘city’ adapts to different definitions and standards and it expands to other confusing concepts, such as metropolis or mega-city. And those are where the majority of the world´s population lives. Size, boundaries, density: how to define quality? How can quantitative and qualitative data be captured and used for these analyses? Spatially mapping parameters is also a task urban designers should keep, not only to inform their work but also to be able to better communicate its justification. 
Washburn divides the process of urban design into three phases: designing the problem, designing the solution and implementing the solution. Each phase is detailed, a complex process when many difficult choices have to be made. Then the products of urban design are described: rules, zoning, plans, and projects. Different scales combined, diverse timing issues, guides for a city´s transformation.

The author also describes the importance of “reading the city around us”. Walking around, drawing, recording important information – it all comes down to a great result: awareness. Just as talented Antoni Muntadas showed in his exhibition Warning! Perception requires involvement. The repetitive cycle of urban design starts with observation and continues with analysis and representation. Developing the tools which will “control nothing but influence everything” leading to the desired change.

To exemplify these processes and products, the successful story of the High Line is told in the next chapter. Coordinating the three phases of the urban design process and making all products in their different scales compatible is very difficult to be seen anywhere. Politics, finance and design have played their roles – as their normally do – and in this case allowed for transformation to happen.

Urban resilience comes as the topic of the last chapter. Washburn writes about our relationship with nature and how climate change plays a major role in the future of cities. How can our cities grow while fixing their existing imbalances and becoming sustainable? He presents strategies for long-term environmental goals organized by him as a set of “ecometrics” which keep track of mitigation and adaptation. Although one might discuss the degree of influence humans have on global warming, its effects may not be ignored.

How well cities have been planned and designed affects their priorities. New York City, for example, has been consistently investing in its subway network which enables choices which couldn´t be made by most cities in Brazil. Mobility, geotechnical risk areas and sanitation – to mention a few – are priorities to be faced by local urban designers working in Latin America.

Professionals interested in leaving their cities better than they found it, as the Athenian Oath praises, have a great challenge ahead and fully understanding it is job ‘one’. That is why the readership of the book is global. Design will not save the city, but its process and products just might.