1 | Defining Urban Design

How might we best define urban design?

no simple definition

 No single definition of urban design exists

 Taken separately and from a standard dictionary, the words ‘urban’ and
‘design’ have quite clear meanings, but not so much in the context of ‘urban
design’

attempts at defining urban design

 In practice the term urban design is now used extremely loosely to

encompass anything from the design of a building façade to proposals for an
entire settlement, or from the management of the public realm and control of
design through planning policy to the outcomes of the market led
development process

 In short whilst there is agreement that urban design exists there is

considerably less agreement about what it is, and perhaps this is a good
thing…

 Some agreement about parameters is however required.

simple definitions of urban design

 Two contrasting definitions of urban design

 Other recent definitions attempt to sum up the remit of urban design in

simple terms

broader definitions of urban design

 The definitions provide useful summaries of urban design but fail to

encapsulate its complex and multifaceted nature.

 Broader definitions more successfully capture this complexity

 Through analysing these definitions a number of reoccurring dimensions of

urban design become obvious:
1. The time dimension
2. The scale dimension
3. The visual dimension
4. The perceptual dimension
5. The social dimension
6. The functional dimension
an agenda for urban design

 The diversity adds to the ambiguity of urban design

 Where do we draw the boundaries between these wide ranging but

overlapping activities? According to the Urban Design Group (UDG), we don’t

 Urban design has emerged as a discipline, primarily because it is able to

consider the relationship between form and function of adjacent sites

 To a certain degree it is in contrast to architecture, constrained by site

boundaries and client intentions, and planning, which still does not deal with
issues pertaining to the physical design agenda

1. urban design occupies the central ground and operates in interstices between
institutions;
2. urban design is concerned with careful stewardship of resources of the built
environment, particularly the public realm;
3. urban design is concerned with helping both the users and the producers of
the urban environment;
4. urban designers must understand and interpret community needs and
aspirations;
5. urban design operates within the procedures of urban development to
achieve community objectives;
6. urban designers should be as much promoters and enablers as controllers of
urban development.