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.

New projects, new skills

Twenty-five years later, urban design is a mainstream professional activity, which local and
central government and local communities greatly value. But urban design has not turned into a
new profession somewhere between architecture and planning. Urban design is more than that: it
is a set of skills, a state of mind and a way of thinking.

Some urban designers have a background in planning, some in architecture or landscape

architecture, some in geography, engineering or economics, and many in more than one field.
Urban designers do not have a standard set of skills that, once learned, can be applied
mechanically for the rest of their careers. The best urban design involves working in teams with
groups of professionals with a wide range of complementary skills, and with non-professionals
who have their own knowledge and expertise. Urban designers learn new skills and aptitudes
with each project.

Why is urban design important?

Urban design is a key to making places that are successful both socially and economically, good
to live in, and attractive to visit. Urban design is essential in creating community identity. It
effective planning in the widest sense, and it can help to deliver better public services. It also
helps to achieve value for money in new developments, and to make good use of scarce
resources. Careful urban design may contribute to a reduction in crime and anti-social behaviour.

What do urban designers do?

1. Developing ‘visions’ for places – using creativity and imagination to invent or re-invent
the environments we live and work in.

2. Designing built spaces – from whole towns and neighbourhoods to individual streets or
squares.
 Advising on the design of developments and regeneration projects.

3. Researching and analysing places and people – understanding the physical, political,
economic, spatial and psychological context of the places you work with and the people
who use them.

4. Influencing people by using your skills and knowledge to help others make better
decisions and teach them how to make successful places.

5. Developing guidance and policies relating to the built environment.

6. Community consultation – helping the public to take part in planning and designing their
neighbourhoods.

7. Graphic representation – from sketching and technical drawing to using the latest
technologies and packages in visualisation and computer aided design.

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.

We are all urban designers now

The multi-professional nature of urban design is reflected in the Urban Design Alliance (UDAL).
This brings together most of the built environment professional bodies and some associated
organisations. They recognise that all their members are, to some extent at least, urban designers,
as their work shapes the built environment. UDAL sees its role as being to encourage closer
collaboration between professions in their working lives and between their professional
institutes.

Designing for an unpredictable future

Towns and cities are constantly changing, and in ways that are unpredictable. How will we be
living, working, shopping or enjoying ourselves in 10, 20 or 30 years time? We don’t know. That
does not mean that we can not plan and design. What it does mean is that we need to plan and
design flexible frameworks that can accommodate change.

In thinking about the future, we need to understand the past and the present. We need to know
about the physical characteristics of the places we are planning, including their landscape,
waterways and ecologies. We need to understand local economic and market conditions. And we
need to know about the people who live there – how they live, how they work, how they move
about the area and what they hope for the place’s future.
A nose for politics
Whose interests do urban designers serve? It’s a tricky question. Any urban development is
likely to affect different people in different ways. The developer has certain interests; the people
who will occupy the buildings have others; people who pass by the buildings and use adjoining
spaces will have interests of their own. On top of that there is what is called ‘the public interest’,
which is hard to define.

The public interest is not just of the people in the locality, but perhaps also of those in other parts
of the world who may bear the consequences of our use of resources. And the public interest
concerns not just people today and in the immediate future, but future generations that will face
the consequences of our decisions. Reconciling these potentially conflicting interests will appeal
to someone who likes a challenge. In a democracy that reconciliation happens through the
political process, which is why many of the best urban designers have an acute political nose.

nterested in becoming an urban designer?

The scope of the job
Urban design offers a great deal of variety. Throughout your career you can work around the
world; for yourself and for others; and in the public sector (for a local authority, for example)
and in the private sector (for a consultancy or a developer, for example). Day-to-day activities
are very diverse, and there is huge scope to specialise and learn new skills.