What is Urban Design in Architecture?

When we speak of Urban Design we must think of it as a collaborative effort. It is the collaborative and multidisciplinary process of shaping the landscape or physical setting for life in cities, towns, and villages. It also involves the design of buildings, groups of a building, spaces and landscapes, and the establishment of frameworks and processes that facilitate successful development. To understand urban design, we must think about how the development of a city shapes the lives of its citizens. City developments must be dynamic, following the changes in culture and lifestyle of the citizens living in it.

What is Urban Designing?

Why Urban Design is important? Urban design is the process of designing and shaping cities, towns, and villages. Whereas architecture focuses on individual buildings, urban design address the larger scale of groups of buildings, streets and public spaces, whole neighborhoods and districts, and entire cities, to make urban areas functional, attractive, and sustainable.

Urban design is an interdisciplinary subject that unites all the built environment professions, including urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture, civil and municipal engineering. It is common for professionals in all these disciplines to practice urban design. In more recent times different sub-strands of urban design have emerged such as strategic urban design, landscape urbanism. The tools used to communicate urban design concepts and interventions—Google Earth, GIS, SketchUp, image manipulation are free, easy to learn, and transformative. With our knowledge about planning principles and the design of place in hand, these communication tools fundamentally change who can claim the role of urban design.

What is effective Urban Design?

Developing ‘visions’ for places – using creativity and imagination to invent or reinvent the environments we live and work in. Designing built spaces – from whole towns and neighborhoods to individual streets or squares. Advising on the design of developments and regeneration projects. Researching and analyzing places and people – understanding the physical, political, economic, spatial, and psychological context of the places you work with and the people who use them. Influencing people by using your skills and knowledge to help others make better decisions and teach them how to make successful places. Developing guidance and policies relating to the built environment. Community consultation – helping the public to take part in planning and designing their neighborhoods. Graphic representation – from sketching and technical drawing to using the latest technologies and packages in visualization and computer-aided design.

Urban Design, How important is it for cities?

It is the art of creating and shaping cities and towns. It involves the arrangement and design of buildings, public spaces, transport systems, services, and amenities. It is the process of giving form, shape, and character to groups of buildings, to whole neighborhoods, and the city. It is a framework that orders the elements into a network of streets, squares, and blocks. The urban design blends architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning together to make urban areas functional and attractive.

Why Urban Design is good for Architecture?

Historically, several urban design practices have witnessed major changes and modifications during implementation, or even been left incomplete. It has been common that the urban design projects may turn out differently than proposed in the initial plan. Urban design in practice faced a lot of criticism regarding the theoretical aspects of definition, objectives, stakeholders, process flow, as well as the uncertain relationship with other disciplines such as Planning and Architecture. Those aspects can be defined as the constituting elements of the urban design process. These elements require critical analysis to understand some reasons why theoretical dreams turn out different from practices.

Urban Design and Architecture Relationship?

Urban design theories and ideologies are mostly derived from architecture, and usually, architects are the ones in practice becoming urban designers. Although urban design is primarily responsible for the unbuilt environment, it is still concerned with how it connects with the built environment. Theoretically, urban design should have the ability to set some rules for the design of those elements connected to the public realm, in terms of the design of the building. Yet the built environment is commonly the responsibility and design of the architect, not the urban designer. This relationship becomes more complex due to the overlap between the micro-scale of the architect’s operations and the larger scale where the architect overlaps with the urban designer’s responsibilities.