‘WHAT IS URBAN DESIGN?’

‘ WHAT IS URBAN DESIGN ? ’ It is the first question that everyone ask when we heard about this major.

We may have more understanding about Urban Planning，Architecture，landscape and so on，but we do not have a clear vision about Urban Design.Some people believe urban design is more like urban planning，other might argue that it is more like landscape. It is understandable because everyone has different background，from education to nationality，even gender. But clearly, we all have something in commen，is that we design for people.

So what exactly is Urban Design？

I think it is a combination of varies elements：

■The multi-disciplinary activity of shaping and managing the urban environment.
■It combines technical, social and expressive concerns–urban designers combine methods and techniques in environmental design with theories and practice of social sciences.
■Urban designers use both verbal and visual communication and engage in a range of scales of the urban continuum.

To summarise, urban design is the discipline of designing the functions and spaces of cities and planning the form and scale of cities for people,and the most important part is“Design For People”.

Like I mentioned before，people have different impression about urban design because there are other disciplines which have some similarity to it. For instance，urban planning also design cities，but they do it in different form，in the UK，urban planning focus more on policy rather than some specific physical desgin，while Architecture is the design of a single building, smaller in scale and scope. So what we urban designers should do are design the gap between these disciplines，make sure all these disciplines work togather perfectly and creat a coherent urban environment for people to live in.

Now with a basic understanding of the concept of urban design, how do we put it into practice?

I think urban design can be put into practice only when we can draw from the ideas of these historical figures and combine them with the current state of modern urban development, targeting the right solution for different types of cities.

BEFORE THE TERM ‘URBAN DESIGN’ IS USED

The early Austrian designers, for example, but their focus on urban design favoured aesthetic priorities, preferring to design various frames that guide the eye, which can refer to the buildings on either side of the alleyway or to the building structures themselves (e.g. colonnades). Through these frames the eye is directed to a specific target landscape.

Another attempt at urban design is found in the design of squares, exemplified by the emergence of the‘TURBINE SQUARE’, which are usually quadrilateral in shape, with the four sides of the box extending out from one of their vertices and not intersecting each other, creating a square that seems to have a swirling momentum. In the words of Ravenna: It isn’t possible to see out of the square along more than one street exit at a time…

Now that we talked about a way of square design，we have to mention about‘SITTE’S GENERAL PRINCIPLES’.Sitte believe that if a square serves a specific major building，it should have depth 1-2 times the height to appreciate the main building.Secondly,he think that we should not let those sculptures be placed randomly and should keep the square clear so that it can be used to hold events.

As cities developed into the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War and the Industrial Revolution, designers’ visions of cities began to change and revolutionary and bold new urban visions began to emerge. The most famous of these were the modern cities of Le Corbusier and others, where the concept of ‘machine for living’ was introduced while more conservative design concepts were suppressed or even abandoned.

Then, as living standards rose, the overdeveloped modernism began to be criticised , and people began to miss the‘old city’.They miss the streets and dislike the roads. It can be seen that urban designers are always torn between innovation and retro, and I believe that when we find the balance between these two in urban design, that design will be the one that is unique, high-tech and close to nature.

OTHER INSIGHTS

As the world’s cities are now diverse and numerous, there are two trends in designers’ explorations of urban design: the more simplistic and brutal, razing the past to create new cities, and the more conservative, choosing to improve and maintain existing cities. The first kind of designers provides the impetus for revolutionary innovation in the urban design, while the other group supports the preservation and development of the city’s human history and culture. I think they all have there important place in the history of developing Urban Design.And urban design can be put into practice only when we can draw from the ideas of these historical figures and combine them with the current state of modern urban development, targeting the right solution for different types of cities.

Reference：

Larice, M. and Macdonald, E. (2010). The urban design reader. London: Routledge.

MO, H.-D. (2009). Sudoku Square—A New Design in Field Experiment. ACTA AGRONOMICA SINICA, 34(9), pp.1489–1493.

Jacobs, J. (1961)The Death and Life of Great American Cities: the failure of modern town planning

Sitte, C (1889, 1965) City Planning according to artistic principles