Combining 'old' and 'new' architectural idioms, this Denver example shows how urban design can make the most of the way we experience urban space as we move through it.
While it varies both in how it is defined and how it is put into practice, Urban Design has gained prominence across the Anglo-American world in recent years. It combines key aspects of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning, and Civil Engineering, reaching in important ways beyond each of those disciplines. Urban Design practitioners give shape and form to city blocks, districts, and metropolitan areas, articulating urban plans in four dimensions, including space and time (how we experience an urban place as we move through it).
Urban Designers increasingly occupy a central role in the development and redevelopment of cities. They must draw simultaneously on the analysis and policy roles of Urban Planners as well as the form-giving and aesthetic-quality responsibilities of Architects. Through collaborative discussion and debate with communities and key stakeholders, Urban Designers derive the rules, guidelines, and frameworks that developers, Architects, and builders must follow for creating and manipulating the built environment.
In practical terms, Urban Design provides a set of descriptive and analytical tools for working with the tangibles of landscape, built form, land use, and hard infrastructure. Its concepts and methods also enable us to examine and make sense of how people use space. Critical, then, is ‘life between buildings’ (as Danish Architect Jan Gehl described it in the English title of his 1996 book). Urban Design often also encompasses economic projections, creating and ‘marketing’ a distinctive look for new developments, negotiating public/private financial partnerships, setting up guidelines and standards for historic revitalisation, as well as forming non-profit corporations that link citizens with public- and private-sector financing (Batchelor & Lewis, 1986).
Unlike what was done in the past under the auspices of grandiose civic Architecture (the Boulevards of Paris, for instance) or modernist Urban Planning (the massive rebuilding of North American city centres in the 50s and 60s, for instance), contemporary Urban Design is not simply the act of manipulating the built environment, nor is it even limited to the creative alignment of strategic interests that effect change in urban form. It is about making places that are well-liked and well-used by people. In the words of the Urban Design Group (2003), an interdisciplinary British professional forum for scholars and practitioners alike:
Good Urban Design helps to create successful places where people want to live, work, and play... 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.
In brief, the contemporary practice of Urban Design focuses on making the most of urban areas to create pleasant places in which to linger, to partake of public life, and to help build strong, tolerant, progressive civil society.
Urban Designers increasingly occupy a central role in the development and redevelopment of cities. They must draw simultaneously on the analysis and policy roles of Urban Planners as well as the form-giving and aesthetic-quality responsibilities of Architects. Through collaborative discussion and debate with communities and key stakeholders, Urban Designers derive the rules, guidelines, and frameworks that developers, Architects, and builders must follow for creating and manipulating the built environment.
In practical terms, Urban Design provides a set of descriptive and analytical tools for working with the tangibles of landscape, built form, land use, and hard infrastructure. Its concepts and methods also enable us to examine and make sense of how people use space. Critical, then, is ‘life between buildings’ (as Danish Architect Jan Gehl described it in the English title of his 1996 book). Urban Design often also encompasses economic projections, creating and ‘marketing’ a distinctive look for new developments, negotiating public/private financial partnerships, setting up guidelines and standards for historic revitalisation, as well as forming non-profit corporations that link citizens with public- and private-sector financing (Batchelor & Lewis, 1986).
Unlike what was done in the past under the auspices of grandiose civic Architecture (the Boulevards of Paris, for instance) or modernist Urban Planning (the massive rebuilding of North American city centres in the 50s and 60s, for instance), contemporary Urban Design is not simply the act of manipulating the built environment, nor is it even limited to the creative alignment of strategic interests that effect change in urban form. It is about making places that are well-liked and well-used by people. In the words of the Urban Design Group (2003), an interdisciplinary British professional forum for scholars and practitioners alike:
Good Urban Design helps to create successful places where people want to live, work, and play... 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.
In brief, the contemporary practice of Urban Design focuses on making the most of urban areas to create pleasant places in which to linger, to partake of public life, and to help build strong, tolerant, progressive civil society.
Categories:
Management of urban planning
