Roles and challenges of urban design

This paper provides an analysis of the rising significance of urban design and the challenges it is facing. It places urban design in the wider context of urban development process, and of the growing importance of cities in the global economy. By adopting a dynamic and multi-dimensional perspective, the paper looks at this process from the viewpoints of producers, regulators, and users of the built environment. Urban design is found to make major contributions for each of these groups, which explains its rising but contested significance; being integrated into the mainstream of the development process has generated new challenges for urban design. The rising significance of urban design Urban design seems to have found widespread popularity, as evident by its increasing presence in professional journals, government websites, academic debates and popular media. The number of jobs advertised for professional urban designers has risen sharply. Many private consultancy firms now include urban design as one of their key skills. Before 1990, as measured by the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, there were only 26 publications in the academic journals on the theme of urban design (www.ibss.bids.ac.uk). Since 1990, however, the number has gone up to 407. Another index, the ISI Web of Knowledge, which also covers the sciences as well as arts and humanities journals, shows the rise from a pre-1990 number of 268 publications to a post-1990 number of 494 (portal.isiknowledge.com). On the website of the Office of Deputy Prime Minister, the main UK government agency dealing urban planning and development, there are now 284 pages that refer to urban design (www.odpm.gov.uk). A quick search in Google takes 0.27 second to find 3.3 million entries for ‘urban design’ (www.google.co.uk). Without the inverted commas, it takes only 0.10 second to generate 73.3 million entries. Only last year, these figures were 0.66 m and 5.6 m respectively; a few years ago, a similar exercise could generate only a handful of entries. There are no fewer than 1.54 m (up from 0.11 m last year) websites for urban design competitions around the world, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney, among others. While these figures partly reflect the dynamics of the information and communication technology, they are also some indications of the phenomenal growth of urban design as a subject. They show how, particularly since the 1980s, urban design has been moving from the margins of architecture and planning into their mainstream. This poses the question: Why? How can we make sense of this growing attention to the subject matter? How can we account for the rising significance of urban design? This may appear a strange question to some; if we do not wish our cities to be shaped in a haphazard way, surely we should design them in the way we want them to be. But until recently, urban design was treated as a novelty, an exercise in beautification of public spaces, showing the limited significance attached to designing cities. This paper tries to find an answer to these questions by searching for an