From the course: Strategic Planning and Urban Design Foundations

What exactly is urban design?

From the course: Strategic Planning and Urban Design Foundations

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What exactly is urban design?

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- A lot of people ask me what is urban design? Textbooks define it as the design of cities, streets, and spaces, which is true. But urban design in just about the buildings. It's also about what we call the public realm, which is everything in between the buildings. It's the parks. It's the streets and plazas. It's the public art and our natural areas and our street furnishings. It's the place where everybody comes together and mixes and interacts. Whether you're walking down the street or waiting for a bus, or sitting on a park bench. This is meant to be the most inclusive space in our city. It's a place where everyone should feel welcome. And that's why I like to define urban design as the pursuit of making better places for people. In this pursuit in making better places for people, we have to create frameworks in which a city can grow and change over time. These frameworks are going to help us shape the urban form and plan our transportation network, and green our cities, and add new jobs. But it's also about context. And as urban designers when we're working in a specific area we must honor the geographic, the cultural, the historic identity of these neighborhoods. We have to make sure that we're really studying the buildings and looking at the age and the materials and the scale. And thinking about the relationship between the built and the unbuilt. It all tells a story. Last, it's not just about space, but it's also about time. No great city was built overnight. It's being built incrementally over centuries. So just a moment and just think about your favorite city. 'Cause it's not frozen in amber. These are places that are shaping and being shaped by different people and different experiences everyday, which is unsurprisingly the way that people are shaped and grown, which really kind of drives home this point that a city is like a living organism. So when we put all of these ingredients together we're going to be able to create a structure for a city to grow and change for the next 20, 50, hundred years in the future, and ensure that we can become more healthy, connected, equitable, and resilient.

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