Urban Design is an act of building desirable places dealing with built environments such as buildings, spaces, open spaces, urban scape, landscape architecture, public facilities, transportation facilities, and infrastructures.
There are two types of works to be done to build an urban space. They are urban planning and urban design which have different characteristics from each other.
Urban planning is a process of grouping and distributing urban spaces so that the whole city may function efficiently. This is more of what you do with the lands in a city giving them specific uses.
Urban design is a process of making a specific space into a 'place' that has a meaning. The English P.P.G.(Planning Policy Guidance) defines urban design as 'relations between buildings, relations between buildings and spaces that form public realms such as streets, squares, and parks, relations between villages, towns, and cities, and the transportation and activity patterns within them, thus in other words, the complex relations between every compound of built environment and natural environment'.
While urban planning is done with using of investigations, analyses, and lots of data to systematically provide the future direction, urban design is done practically using three-dimensional models to propose detailed directions and designs for a place.
The purpose of urban design has changed for many years. In the 1950's the time when the term 'urban design' emerged, designers focused on visual aspects. And in the 1960's, designers changed their aims to artistic aspects and focused more on public spaces to provoke publicness. Now, modern designers have set their eyes on the interrelation between the diversity of urban spaces and the human activities for the designing and managing of places.
Yet, there is not an absolute definition of urban design. When concerning urban design, there is always its allied disciplines that come with. The main three are 'urban planning', 'landscape architecture', and 'architecture'. There has been a controversy between two types who says urban design is distinct from urban planning and the ones who say it isn't. Eventually, urban design is an act of making a place dealing with its allied disciplines-urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture, while considering a wide range of spacial diversity.
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