Urban design shapes the spaces between the buildings
Urban design focuses on buildings and the spaces between them, tying form to geographic place. It works at the scale of streets, public spaces, neighbourhoods, districts, and whole cities, aiming for equitable, beautiful, performative, and sustainable environments. Theory centres on the shared public realm.
The job title is young, but the practice is ancient. Carefully laid-out cities appear in classical China, Greece and Rome, and Hippodamus of Miletus gave his name to the grid plan, earning the label "father of European urban planning." Even medieval towns, often dismissed as haphazard, were frequently designed: Southampton, Wareham and Wallingford, listed in the 9th-century Burghal Hidage, were laid out on grids as fast-built defences against Danish raiders. Some historians argue the influence runs both ways, noting that Descartes credited planned Renaissance towns with shaping his thinking and that such streetscapes may have inspired coordinate geometry.
Baroque planners stretched the formal geometry of gardens like Versailles across whole districts, and James Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah, Georgia, mixed utopian hopes with practical governance. Epidemics in crowded industrial cities pushed Britain to write minimum street widths relative to building heights into law, so homes got light and air. Frederick Law Olmsted and the young profession of landscape architecture joined in during the late 1800s.
In 1898 Ebenezer Howard published Garden Cities of To-morrow, imagining self-contained towns of 32,000 people on 6,000 acres, ringed by parks and cut by six boulevards 120 feet wide; Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City followed. Liverpool offered the first university planning course in 1909, the same year Britain passed its first planning act, while Harvard waited until 1924. Le Corbusier helped found the modernist CIAM congresses in 1928, and the rebel architects of Team X split from them in 1953.
Harvard conferences coined the phrase "urban design" in 1956. Five years later Gordon Cullen's The Concise Townscape introduced "serial vision," reading a city as a chain of linked spaces, and Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities attacked the modernist "city in the park." The field now draws on sociology, law and economics, and has spawned offshoots such as landscape urbanism and water-sensitive design.
Source: Urban design
