Regional and Urban Design Committee

  • 1.  What is Urban Design?

    Posted 11-28-2014 04:43 PM

    Friday, November 28, 2014

    What is Urban Design?

    I was asked to define Urban Design and Master-planning in under 250 words each. The definitions will be used in an online application developed for the American Institute of Architects. After a brief intro those definitions can be found below. 

    As hard as it is to describe to lay people what architects do, it may be even harder to define urban design and describe what urban designers do. Too much are residents of cities used to a system where city "just happens" and where what happens to the city is the result of politics and who has the power and not the result of masterplans or designs or big ideas. Too discredited are the modernists' models of garden cities and new towns that well intended as they were proved to be sterile and even anti urban.  Currently many settle with "Tactical Urbanism" as a way of using quick and bottom up response to shape cities rather than big ideas from the top.
    Garden City, Ebenezer Howard

    Nevertheless, ideas about cities, ideal plans and layouts, concepts that describe a framework for everything that makes a city are not at all a thing of the past. In the age of cities with more people living in cities not only in absolute numbers, but also in relation to the still growing global population (by now more than half), new very large cities are created from scratch in great numbers and they all start with design. Thus, the question what urban design is, is by no means obsolete and the same is true about the question of masterplanning. Finding young, gifted and creative people who are willing to choose urban design as their profession and understand urban design as an important component of system planning is vitally important to the future and well being of the planet. They need a clear understanding what this field of study entails.


             URBAN DESIGN
    Urban design is the art of designing cities, i.e. architecture taken to the urban scale, the site, the neighborhood 

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    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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