Urban Design

Urban design is the design of towns and cities, streets and spaces. It is the collaborative and multi-disciplinary process of shaping the physical setting for life – the art of making places. Urban design involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and establishing frameworks and procedures that will deliver successful development by different people over time.

Urban design is about a great variety of places: whether town and city centres, residential neighbourhoods and suburbs, grassy fields on the edge of villages, down-at-heel industrial estates, or unloved and overlooked areas around train stations, rivers and canals. Urban design defines the nature of buildings and the spaces between them, and how the design itself should be worked out: design processes and outcomes. Urban design inspires, illustrates and defines how a place could be improved or protected to bring benefits to investors, developers and wider society.