Urban design

Urban design is the process of designing and shaping the physical features of cities, towns, and villages and planning for the provision of municipal services to residents and visitors. Although it deals with issues of a larger scale than architecture, it cannot be understood as a wholly separated field of research and design, since the quality of one depends on the quality of the other. In fact, it is this very interdependency, which has been termed relational design by Barcelona-based architect Enric Massip-Bosch, which makes urban design and architecture inextricably linked in many university education programs, especially in Europe. This tendency towards reintegration in architectural studies is also gaining momentum in the USA.

Urban design deals with the larger scale of groups of buildings, infrastructure, streets, and public spaces, entire neighbourhoods and districts, and entire cities, with the goal of making urban environments that are equitable, beautiful, performative, and sustainable.

Urban design is an interdisciplinary field that utilizes the procedures and the elements of architecture and other related professions, including landscape design, urban planning, civil engineering, and municipal engineering. It borrows substantive and procedural knowledge from public administration, sociology, law, urban geography, urban economics and other related disciplines from the social and behavioral sciences, as well as from the natural sciences. In more recent times different sub-subfields of urban design have emerged such as strategic urban design, landscape urbanism, water-sensitive urban design, and sustainable urbanism. Urban design demands an understanding of a wide range of subjects from physical geography to social science, and an appreciation for disciplines, such as real estate development, urban economics, political economy and social theory.

Urban designers work to create inclusive cities that protect the commons, ensure equal access to and distribution of public goods, and meet the needs of all residents, particularly women, people of color, and other marginalized populations. Through design interventions, urban designers work to revolutionize the way we conceptualize our social, political and spatial systems as strategies to produce and reproduce a more equitable and innovative future.

Urban design is about making connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric. Urban design draws together the many strands of place-making, environmental stewardship, social equity and economic viability into the creation of places with distinct beauty and identity. Urban design draws these and other strands together, creating a vision for an area and then deploying the resources and skills needed to bring the vision to life.

Urban design theory deals primarily with the design and management of public space (i.e. the 'public environment', 'public realm' or 'public domain'), and the way public places are used and experienced. Public space includes the totality of spaces used freely on a day-to-day basis by the general public, such as streets, plazas, parks and public infrastructure. Some aspects of privately owned spaces, such as building facades or domestic gardens, also contribute to public space and are therefore also considered by urban design theory. Important writers on urban design theory include Christopher Alexander, Peter Calthorpe, Gordon Cullen, Andres Duany, Jane Jacobs, Mitchell Joachim, Jan Gehl, Allan B. Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi, William H. Whyte, Camillo Sitte, Bill Hillier (Space syntax), and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.