Contents

What is urban design?

Urban design is the process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages. It is the art of making places. It involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and establishing the processes that make successful development possible.

Why are so many places so badly designed?

Why are the places we are building so different from the places we like? So many new developments snuff out what makes a place special and give the impression of having been designed (if that is the word!) by someone with no sense of what makes a successful place.

Why is so much development so badly designed? The fact that 84 per cent of planning applications are drawn up by someone with no design training may have something to do with it.

But being trained in design does not necessarily mean that the person responsible for the development will designing something that might make a successful place. After all, they may not have seen that as their job. They may have been thinking only of limited and short-term aims: to build something that the developer can sell quickly; or to serve the building’s users, rather than making a more pleasant experience for people passing by.

The public interest is wider, and longer term. Urban design appeals to people who are interested in more than just the design of a single building or the interests of a single user. What gets urban designers out of bed in the morning is the challenge of creating a place that will be used and enjoyed by a wide range of different people for different purposes, not only now but in years to come.

A new profession

Urban design is one of the newest professions. The label ‘urban designer’ is little more than 25 years old. Much of what urban designers do – shaping the places where we live – was done by professionals of various kinds before then, but the job was seen from the perspective of particular professions. Architects and planners used to argue about the roles of their two professions.

Architects would accuse planners of interfering with aesthetic matters about which they were not qualified to judge. Planners would accuse architects of designing buildings solely as objects, with little attempt to take account of their context or of their likely impact on the surroundings. In 1978 some architects and planners called a truce. This professional sniping is pointless, they said. We have something in common: we are all in the business of making places. That should be the basis of our working together.

People with a mission

The Urban Design Group was formed, and soon architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, public artists and a range of other professionals were declaring their commitment to urban design. Their mission was to change how the environment was shaped.

They argued that architects should be concerned with the place, not just with designing a building to satisfy the client’s demands alone. Planners should be concerned, not just with land use, but with the physical form of development. Landscape architecture should be involved in analysing and understanding sites at the start of the planning and design process, rather than being brought in at a late stage to disguise ugly buildings with some planting. Highway engineers should use their skills to make places that are pleasant to be in and to walk through, rather than focusing narrowly on keeping the traffic moving.