Urban Design

Abstract

The practice of urban design refers to the planning of urban environments at a macroscale, looking beyond individual buildings to the broader layout of the city and its streets, plazas, landmarks, infrastructure, and other domains of public life. The standardized urban form found in many European and American contexts emerged largely from mid-19th-Century efforts to modernize and regulate the rapidly growing and industrializing cities in those regions. A primary role of urban design in recent decades has been to link cities in to the global economy and to attract foreign investment, which is increasingly important in an era of intercity competition. A further challenge for urban designers is the need to create more livable and sustainable cities, an effort that can be traced back to the earliest urban design models. This and other challenges (e.g., climate change, resource scarcity, affordable housing provision) will require the field of urban design to become increasingly more innovative in terms of its approaches, while also more democratic in terms of the actors and forms of knowledge that are given a voice in decision-making.