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What is an urban designer?

A wide variety of people call themselves urban designers. In one sense anyone who is involved in making places is active in urban design: hence the Urban Design Alliance (UDAL) brings together many of the built environment professions. Even if you do a university course in ‘urban design’, exactly what you learn will depend on which university you choose, as on other courses. The various urban design courses have different emphases.

It is important to understand that urban design is not an accredited profession. There is no professional body that decides what should be on the curriculum of an urban design course, or what expertise and knowledge you need to be able to practise as an urban designer.

An urban designer needs a broad understanding of cities, towns and villages, and ways of making them work better. This involves understanding how the planning system operates, how developers make their sums add up, how to assess what makes a particular place special, how to make places easy to move around by foot and vehicle, how to bring life to places that have become run down, how to conserve historic buildings, how to make the most of the landscape, how to think about the future of small and large development sites, how to involve local people, how to make sure that projects actually happen, how to communicate effectively, how to negotiate, and how to write design policy and guidance.

That sounds like a lot of subjects! But they are all related, and each explains a bit more about how urban places work. The urban designer is not expected to be an expert on all of them, but it is essential to be able to see the whole picture.

More about what urban designers do

A list elsewhere on this website sets out tasks that are carried out by urban designers (whether or not they call themselves that). There is probably no single person who is fully competent in all of them. Think of the list as an exciting menu of possibilities.

The terminology of the items on the list may not mean much to you (like any specialisation urban design has its own specialist language, and the best urban designers take care not to use it to bamboozle people). But the list of things that urban designers do will give you an idea of the range of tasks. See www.udg.org.uk/?document_id=332

Enjoying complexity

Some people engaged in urban design call themselves urban designers (although at a party they may have to explain what that means). Others may use another professional label, or they may prefer not to be labelled at all. Many urban designers are members of more than one professional institute, and they are happy not to fit into any professional pigeonhole. It is not necessary to be a member of a professional institute at all in order to practise as an urban designer (similarly architects and planners do not have to be members of their professional institutes).

Old professions like accountancy and the law may be relatively predictable. Urban design appeals to people who do not want a simple and predictable life, but who are fascinated by the complexity and endless variety of cities, towns and villages.

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