Urban Design Practice gives a fascinating account of the state of urban design practice across the world today. Packed with invaluable local knowledge from on-the-spot contributors, its global scope offers an armoury of background facts and figures to professionals interested in exporting their skills internationally. Along the way it reveals how urban design is practiced, identifies a multitude of key concerns and refines our understanding of what urban design (so often a nebulous concept) means. Aimed broadly at practitioners masterplanners, architects, landscape architects, planners, civil engineers and students and academics of these disciplines, twenty chapters analyse a different country's urban design context. Fully illustrated and structured in a similar way, each chapter features a case study, general background economic statistics, and a handy 'quick guide' to the types of work available, the underlying legislation and tips for securing work. Features chapters of the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Dubai, Egypt, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and the USA.

The town is an organism created and driven by people. The complexity of the problems arising from it poses a challenge to those in positions of responsibility. Oswald and Baccini seek to bring clarity to the web of urban phenomena. They present a highly original model which draws together the two separate fields of architecture and science by considering architecture and urban planning from the scientific perspective. In four main chapters, topics such as new urbanism, the net city, designing with the net-city method, sustainability, renovation, conversion, and responsibility are explored in detail. The examples presented all derive from Switzerland, but the analyses and methodology is valid for any region or country. The theory is complemented by attractive visual material. Franz Oswald is Professor of Architecture and Design, Peter Baccini is Professor of Resource and Waste Management (both at Zurich ETH).

Today the practice of urban design has forged a distinctive identity with applications at many different scales – ranging from the block or street scale to the scale of metropolitan and regional landscapes. Urban design interfaces many aspects of contemporary public policy – multiculturalism, healthy cities, environmental justice, economic development, climate change, energy conservations, protection of natural environments, sustainable development, community liveability, and the like. The field now comprises a core body of knowledge that enfolds a right history of ideas, paradigms, principles, tools, research and applications, enriched by electric influences from the humanities, and social and natural sciences. Companion to Urban Design includes more than fifty original contributions from internationally recognized authorities in the field. These contributions address the following questions: What are the important ideas that have shaped the field and the current practice of urban design? What are the major methods and processes that have influenced the practice of urban design at various scales? What are the current innovations relevant to the pedagogy of urban design? What are the lingering debates, conflicts ad contradictions in the theory and practice of urban design? How could urban design respond to the contemporary challenges of climate change, sustainability, active living initiatives, globalization, and the like? What are the significant disciplinary influences on the theory, research and practice of urban design in recent times? There has never before been a more authoritative and comprehensive companion that includes core, foundational and pioneering ideas and concepts of urban design. This book serves as an invaluable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students, future professionals, and practitioners interested in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, but also in urban studies, urban affairs, geography, and related fields.

Overcrowding, noise and air pollution, long commutes and lack of daylight can take a huge toll on the mental well-being of city-dwellers. With mental healthcare services under increasing pressure, could a better approach to urban design and planning provide a solution? The restrictions faced by city residents around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought home just how much urban design can affect our mental health – and created an imperative to seize this opportunity. Restorative Cities explores a new way of designing cities, one which places mental health and wellness at the forefront. Establishing a blueprint for urban design for mental health, it examines a range of strategies – from sensory architecture to place-making for creativity and community – and brings a genuinely evidence-based approach that will appeal to designers and planners, health practitioners and researchers alike - and provide compelling insights for anyone who cares about how our surroundings affect us. Written by a psychiatrist and public health specialist, and an environmental psychologist with extensive experience of architectural practice, this much-needed work will prompt debate and inspire built environment students and professionals to think more about the positive potential of their designs for mental well-being.

Explores how urban design has responded to the trends towards global standardisation. Following analysis of its practice in the local domain, this book looks at how urban planning and design should be repositioned. It looks at: population; urbanization; suburbanization; tourism; commercialization; environmental degradation; and, flow of capital.

This text explores how architectural and urban design values have been co-opted by global cities to enhance their economic competitiveness by creating a superior built environment that is not just aesthetically memorable but more productive and sustainable. It focuses on the experience of central Sydney through its policy commitment to ?design excellence? and more particularly to mandatory competitive design processes for major private development. Framed within broader contexts that link it to comparable urban policy and design issues in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, it provides a scholarly but accessible volume that provides a balanced and critical overview of a policy that has changed the design culture, development expectations, public realm and skyline of central Sydney, raising issues surrounding the uneven distribution of benefits and costs, professional practice, representative democracy, and implications of globalization.

Public spaces mirror the complexities of urban societies: as historic social bonds have weakened and cities have become collections of individuals public open spaces have also changed from being embedded in the social fabric of the city to being a part of more impersonal and fragmented urban environments. Can making public spaces help overcome this fragmentation, where accessible spaces are created through inclusive processes? This book offers some answers to this question through analysing the process of urban design and development in international case studies, in which the changing character, level of accessibility, and the tensions of making public spaces are explored. The book uses a coherent theoretical outlook to investigate a series of case studies, crossing the cultural divides to examine the similarities and differences of public space in different urban contexts, and its critical analysis of the process of development, management and use of public space, with all its tensions and conflicts. While each case study investigates the specificities of a particular city, the book outlines some general themes in global urban processes. It shows how public spaces are a key theme in urban design and development everywhere, how they are appreciated and used by the people of these cities, but also being contested by and under pressure from different stakeholders.

The members of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), such as Josep Lluis Sert, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and their American associates, developed the discipline now called "urban design, " which has had a significant influence on both university departments and building projects around the world.

Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products, 2nd Edition provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to urban design, defining the field and addressing the controversies and goals of urban design. Including over 50 updated international case studies, this new edition presents a three-dimensional model with which to categorize the processes and products involved: product type, paradigm type, and procedural type. The case studies not only illuminate the typology but provide information that designers can use as precedents in their own work. Uniquely, these case study projects are framed by the design paradigm employed, categorized by procedural type instead of instrumental or land use function. The categories used here are Total Urban Design, All-of-a-piece Urban Design, Plug-in Urban Design, and Piece-by-piece Urban Design. Written for both professionals and those encountering urban design in their day-to-day life, Urban Design is an essential introduction to the field and practice, considering the future direction of the field and what can be learned from the past.