First blog ice break

It has been more than five years since I first started working on urban design. Every year that I have studied this, I feel that my understanding of urban design has improved.

Now, I would like to introduce my current understanding of the overall urban design and how various factors in the city play their functions and roles in my eyes.

What is urban design: I think urban design is a discipline that focuses on the planning and layout of cities and their functions and public Spaces. It is a specific and graphic discipline, including a lot of content, such as architecture, landscape, roads, power grid, water network and so on. As long as the elements appear in the city are basically within the scope of urban design, so it requires designers to have very rich knowledge and strong overall planning ability.

The urban subsystems such as architecture, transportation, open space, greening system and cultural relics protection are cross integrated, connected and penetrated. It is a system design in an integrated state. At the same time, urban design also has the attribute of artistic creation. Through the control of visual order, it can establish an easily identifiable urban image and atmosphere.

Objectives of urban design: The goal of modern urban design is to create a comfortable, convenient, and beautiful space environment for people. Urban design is a comprehensive design of various material elements in a certain regional space on the premise of achieving the predetermined unified goal, so as to make the city achieve the mutual cooperation and coordination of various facilities and functions, the unity and perfection of spatial form and the optimization of comprehensive benefits.

In short, the main goal of urban design is to create an artificial and natural environment that makes human activities more meaningful, so as to improve people’s space environment quality and change people’s quality of life.

The quality of space environment is based on human needs. Quality means the superiority of the spatial environment. The application to the city depends on the pleasant natural connection, the matching of scale and interest and the elimination of uncoordinated contrast. For urban residents, it means a good life and naturally take certain measures to ensure safety, health, comfort, entertainment and convenience. The quality of the space environment must also include the privacy of life, activities of interest.

Elements: Kevin Lynch said Urban design has five elements: path, edge，district，node，landmark. I have a brief summary of this.

Path is the main element of urban image perception. Usually, a stranger to a new city must first find a reference or recognize the road. It has directionality, scalability and network space system.

Edge is a linear element other than roads. The constituent elements of urban boundary include both natural boundary and artificial boundary, which makes people form cultural and psychological boundary markers.

District is a relatively large urban area that the observer can imagine entering. It has some universal characteristics and produces place effect.

Nodes are the connection points of urban structure space and main elements, and also represent the convergence point and concentration point of people’s urban image to varying degrees. Some nodes are more likely to be the center and core of the city and region.

Landmarks are point references, “external observation reference points of observers, and may be simple ignorance elements with variable scales”.

Finally: I suppose that the urban design should resolve various contradictions in three-dimensional urban spatial coordinates and establish a new three-dimensional form system. It focuses on the combination of various relationships in the city. For a city, its development is the most important, because only when the city itself develops, can it drive the people in the city to develop, which will form a virtuous circle and make the urban development better and better.