Urban Design as an Integrative Profession




Urban designers work with architects, landscape architects, transportation engineers, urban planners, and industrial designers to reshape the city. Cooperation with public agencies, authorities, and the interests of nearby property owners is necessary to manage public spaces. Users often compete over the spaces and negotiate across a variety of spheres. Input is frequently needed from a wide range of stakeholders. This can lead to different levels of participation as defined in Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation.

While there are some professionals who identify themselves specifically as urban designers, a majority have backgrounds in urban planning, architecture, or landscape architecture. Many collegiate programs incorporate urban design theory and design subjects into their curricula. There are an increasing number of university programs offering degrees in urban design at the post-graduate level.

Urban design considers:

  • Pedestrian zones
  • Incorporation of nature within a city
  • Aesthetics
  • Urban structure – arrangement and relation of business and people
  • Urban typology, density and sustainability - spatial types and morphologies related to intensity of use, consumption of resources and production and maintenance of viable communities
  • Accessibility – safe and easy transportation
  • Legibility and wayfinding – accessible information about travel and destinations
  • Animation – Designing places to stimulate public activity
  • Function and fit – places support their varied intended uses
  • Complementary mixed uses – Locating activities to allow constructive interaction between them
  • Character and meaning – Recognizing differences between places
  • Order and incident – Balancing consistency and variety in the urban environment
  • Continuity and change – Locating people in time and place, respecting heritage and contemporary culture
  • Civil society – people are free to interact as civic equals, important for building social capital
  • Participation / engagement – including people in the decision-making process can be done at many different scales.

Relationships With Other Related Disciplinesedit

The original urban design was thought to be separated from architecture and urban planning. Urban design has developed to a certain extent, but it still comes from the foundation of architecture. Most urban designers are primarily trained in architecture. It is often considered as a branch under the architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture and essentially the construction of the urban physical environment. Now urban design is more integrated into the social science-based, cultural, economic, political and other aspects. Not only focus on space and architectural groups, but also look at the whole city from a broader and more holistic perspective to shape a better living environment. Compared to architecture, the spatial and temporal scale of urban design processing is much larger. It deals with neighborhoods, communities, and even the entire city.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

History

Image
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: references need proper formatting; citations are missing Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this section if you can. ( January 2017 ) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Although contemporary professional use of the term 'urban design' dates from the mid-20th century, urban design as such has been practiced throughout history. Ancient examples of carefully planned and designed cities exist in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and are particularly well known within Classical Chinese, Roman and Greek cultures (see Hippodamus of Miletus). citation needed European Medieval cities are often, and often erroneously, regarded as exemplars of undesigned or 'organic' city development. citation needed There are many examples of considered urban design in the Middle Ages (see, e.g., David Friedman, Florentine New Towns:
Read more

Issues

The field of urban design holds enormous potential for helping us address today’s biggest challenges: an expanding population, mass urbanization, rising inequality, and climate change. In its practice as well as its theories, urban design attempts to tackle these pressing issues. As climate change progresses, urban design can mitigate the results of flooding, temperature changes, and increasingly detrimental storm impacts through a mindset of sustainability and resilience. In doing so, the urban design discipline attempts to create environments that are constructed with longevity in mind. Cities today must be designed to minimize resource consumption, waste generation, and pollution while also withstanding the unknown impacts of climate change. In order to be truly resilient, our cities need to be able to not just bounce back from a catastrophic climate event, but to bounce forward to an improved state. Justice is and will always be a key issue in urban design. As previously mentioned,
Read more

The Urban Design Education

Image
Following the 1956 Urban Design conference, Harvard University established the first graduate program with urban design in its title, The Master of Architecture in Urban Design, although as a subject taught in universities its history in Europe is far older. Urban design programs explore the built environment from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and points of view. The pedagogically innovative combination of interdisciplinary studios, lecture courses, seminars, and independent study creates an intimate and engaged educational atmosphere in which students thrive and learn. Soon after in 1961, Washington University in St. Louis founded their Master of Urban Design program. Today, eighteen urban design programs exist in the United States: Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI Ball State University - Indianapolis, IN Columbia University - New York, NY City College of New York - New York, NY Georgia Tech - Atlanta, GA Harvard University - Cambridge, MA Iowa State University - Ames,
Read more