Contents
- Benefits of joining
- Aims
- An urban design manifesto for the government
- 30 years of the UDG
- What is urban design?
Eight good reasons for joining the Urban Design Group:
- URBAN DESIGN, the leading journal in its field
- Urban Design Directory - the guide to urban design practices, courses and sources of information
- Events, seminars, conferences and overseas study tours at reduced rates
- Regional events and activities
- STREET, the young urban designers' network
- For Practice members, entries in UD Journal Practice Index and Urban Design Directory, plus a listing on the website (www.udg.org.uk)
- Discounts on publications, training and recruitment services
- 30 per cent discount on subscriptions to RUDI (Resource for Urban Design Information).
Founded in 1978, the Urban Design Group is a campaigning membership organisation. It believes that urban design is not the job of any single profession. Making successful places depends on breaking down professional barriers and building collaborations between the people with the power to make things happen.
You are invited to become a member of the Urban Design Group by returning the form and contribute to the debate. The Urban Design Group has generated a wide range of activities to meet its stated objectives and the needs of its members:
Today the Urban Design Group works to:
- Promote best practice in urban design
- Build an effective framework of policy in local and central government
- Improve skills among those who shape the built environment
- Promote collaboration in the urban design process
- Show decision-makers the value of urban design
- Make urban design and planning accessible to everyone
Thirty years of campaigning by the Urban Design Group (UDG) has played a large part in putting urban design on political and professional agendas. Our job now is to build on that achievement.
We need higher standards of design in every place where buildings turn their backs on their surroundings; where segregated single-use enclaves make passers-by feel like intruders; where over-engineered roads put pedestrians last; and where urban and rural sites are wasted by suburban sprawl.
Good urban design helps to create successful places where people want to live, work and play. Making better spaces for people to enjoy depends on the work of the UDG and its members.
An urban design manifesto for the government
The Urban Design Group (UDG) has successfully campaigned since 1978 for urban design to be on the national agenda. The need for high standards of urban design is at last almost universally accepted. What are still missing are the skills, practices and frameworks on which good design depends. The UDG is focusing on what needs to be done to put these in place. We urge the government to give high priority to implementing the following 12-point programme:
Put design at the heart of the new planning system
1 Vision plans Require local planning authorities to produce an urban design vision plan as an integral part of every local development framework.
2 Development briefs Require planning authorities to produce and approve supplementary planning guidance explaining how they will deal with design matters such as development briefs and design statements. A development brief should be prepared for every site larger than 0.5 hectares that the local authority has identified for development.
Integrate planning and transport
3 Integration Unite decision-making on planning and transportation throughout all levels of government from cabinet down.
4 Public realm strategies Require local authorities to prepare public realm strategies that integrate planning and transport matters into a single policy vehicle for the public realm. Local communities must be involved in this process. Such strategies must set out how the quality of design and the maintenance of streets and squares will be improved to make them more attractive, safer, cleaner and greener.
Develop urban design skills
5 Urban designers Ensure that every local authority employs at least one urban designer by 2007, to support more effective planning and higher design standards.
6 Bursaries Set up a bursary scheme to help professionals study for postgraduate qualifications in urban design through universities that already offer diploma and masters courses in the subject. The professionals would come from a variety of backgrounds, such as planning, architecture, engineering, surveying and landscape architecture. The scheme, run on the lines of the ODPM’s bursary scheme for postgraduate planning courses, could be linked to local authorities’ performance through the planning delivery grant.
Promote sustainable development
7 Access Insist that every new neighbourhood should be within a 10-minute
walk of a station or bus stop, and that existing neighbourhoods are within a 10-minute walk of new or extended public transport routes.
8 VAT Encourage the re-use of existing buildings by zero-rating VAT on repairs and restoration.
9 Greener buildings and spaces Introduce measures to encourage investment in sustainable development through renewable energy, reducing CO2 emissions, and increased biodiversity.
Champion urban design
10 Design champions Require every local planning authority to appoint a design champion with responsibility for the built environment and public spaces at cabinet level.
11 Agencies Support the Academy for Sustainable Communities in promoting design skills, CABE in championing design, CABE Space in championing public space, and the Urban Design Alliance (UDAL) in breaking down the silos between the professions and in promoting collaboration between professional disciplines on every major project.
12 Public spending Require those responsible for all public expenditure on buildings and infrastructure to provide evidence of how they will ensure high design standards.
Thirty years of the Urban Design Group
The foundation of the UDG is dated to 22 November 1978, when Francis Tibbalds, Keith Ingham, Percy Johnson-Marshall, Kevin Eastham and others convened a meeting at the RIBA under the title 'Architects in Planning'. Arnold Linden, an early member of the UDG, recalls: 'They did so knowing full well that the institutes of architecture and of planning no longer recognised each other's legitimate role in the creation of the urban scene. The public realm had become, by default, largely the consequences of mechanistic decisions by highways, traffic and municipal engineers.'
The name Urban Design Group was soon coined, with the subtitle: 'a forum for architects, landscape architects and designers in planning'. Arnold Linden notes: 'The group held from its inception that everyone acting in the environment was an urban designer, whether they were performing positively, negatively or just passively, because the decisions they make (or disregard) affect the quality of urban spaces.'
The name
- Architects in Planning (November 1978)
- Designers in Planning Group (January 1979)
- Urban Design Group (since February 1979)
Kevin Lynch Memorial Lecture
1986 Leon Krier
1987 Norman St John Stevas
1988 Sir Roy Strong
1989 Sir Philip Dowson
1990 Tony Coombes
1992 Peter Hall
1993 Patrick Hodgkinson
1994 Sir Peter Shepheard
1995 Sherban Cantacuzino
1996 Cedric Price
1997 Charles Jencks
1998 Ricky Burdett
1999 Rem Koolhaas
2000 Stefan Schroth
2001 Dickon Robinson
2002 West 8
2003 David Lunts
2004 Alfonso Vegara
2005 Hank Dittmar
2006 Peter Bishop
2007 Philip Singleton and Kelvin Campbell
2008 Peter Heath
2009 John Thorp
Annual UDG Lecture
1993 Richard Rogers
1994 Zaha Hadid
1995 Piers Gough
1996 Terry Farrell
1997 Michael Cassidy
1998 Peter Hall
1999 Jon Rouse
2000 Alan Baxter
2002 Les Sparks
2003 Ken Yeang
2004 Sir Peter Hall
2005 Sebastian Loew
Presidents
Roy Worskett 1983-85
Terry Farrell 1985-89
John Worthington 1989-91, 1992-93
Francis Tibbalds 1991-92
Chairs
Francis Tibbalds 1979-86
Arnold Linden 1986-89
Lawrence Revill 1989-91
Kelvin Campbell 1991-92
Jon Rowland 1992-97
Roger Evans 1997-2000
Marcus Wilshere 2000-02
Alan Stones 2002-04
Barry Sellers 2004-06
Ben van Bruggen 2006-8
Duncan Ecob 2008-10
Current Chair: Amanda Reynolds 2010-
Current patrons of the Urban Design Group
Alan Baxter
Tom Bloxham
Sir Terry Farrell
Colin Fudge
Nicky Gavron
Dickon Robinson
Les Sparks
John Worthington
Previous patrons
Honor Chapman
Sir Philip Dowson
Sir Peter Hall
Simon Jenkins
Jane Priestman
Sir Richard MacCormac
What is urban design?
Urban design is the collaborative and multi-disciplinary process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages; the art of making places; design in an urban context. Urban design involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and the establishment of frameworks and processes that facilitate successful development.
Peter Webber defines urban design as 'the process of moulding the form of the city through time'. Jerry Spencer has described it as 'creating the theatre of public life'. To Carmona, Heath, Oc and Tiesdell it is 'the process of making better places for people than would otherwise be produced'. The urban designer Doug Paterson has defined urban design as 'merging civitas and the urbs: building the values and ideals of a civilized place into the structure of a city'. Peter Batchelor and David Lewis define urban design as 'design in an urban context'. They use the word design 'not in its traditional narrow sense, but in a much broader way. Economic projections, packaging new developments, negotiating public/private financial partnerships, setting up guidelines and standards for historic revitalisation, forming non-profit corporations that combine citizens with public and private sector financing resources, all are considered as design.'
In the words of the writer and critic Peter Buchanan: 'Urban design is about how to recapture certain of the qualities (qualities which we experience as well as those we see) that we associate with the traditional city: a sense of order, place, continuity, richness of experience, completeness and belonging. Urban design lies somewhere between the broad-brush abstractions of planning and the concrete specifics of architecture. It implies a notion of citizenship: life in the public realm. It is not just about space, but time as well. Much of what passes for urban design is conceived only for one moment. Good urban design is more than just knitting together the townscape. Urban designers should be configuring a rich network in which buildings come and go: a framework of transport, built fabric and other features, which will create natural locations for things. Urban design structures activities.'
Buchanan has written that 'urban design is concerned with analysing, organising and shaping urban form so as to elaborate as richly and as coherently as possible the lived experience of the inhabitants. In essence it is about the interdependence and mutual development of both city and citizen. And at its core is the recognition that, just as the citizen is both biological organism and self-consciously acculturated persona, so the city too is an organism shaped by powerful intrinsic, almost natural, forces (that must be understood and respected in any successful intervention) and a wilfully, even self-consciously, created cultural artefact. Interventions of the creative will have always guided the city's growth and change, elaborated its identity in many ways large and small as well as conceived and realised those crowning glories that make great cities so special. Urban design is essentially about place making, where place is not just a specific space, but all the activities and events that it makes possible. As a consequence the whole city is enriched. Instead of a city fragmented into islands of no place and anywhere, it remains a seamlessly meshed and richly varied whole. In such a city, daily life is not reduced to a dialectic between city centre and one of the similar suburbs: instead the citizen is encouraged to avail himself of the whole city, to enjoy all its various parts and so enrich his experience and education (become street-wise) in the ways only real urban life allows.'
Some urban designers define urban design as 'the design of the spaces between buildings', presumably to distinguish it from architecture, which they define as the design of the buildings themselves. This definition excludes urban design's proper concern with the structure of a place; it ignores the fact that to a significant extent the characteristics of the spaces between buildings are determined by the buildings themselves; and it encourages architects in any tendency they may have to ignore the context in which they are designing. The question of where urban design should or does fit into the landscape of urban professions -- whether it should be regarded as a distinct profession itself, or as a way of thinking, or as common ground between a number of professions or between a wide range of people involved in urban change, for example -- is widely discussed.
Barry Young has suggested one set of stages for the urban design process. These are: a) Define physical design principles. b) Identify performance criteria. c) Develop design options. d) Evaluate the options in terms of design principles and performance criteria. e) Develop the preferred option.
Abercrombie and Forshaw wrote in their 1943 County of London Plan of the 'low level of urban design' in pre-war London. Urban design was being discussed in the American planning profession in the 1950s. What is generally said to have been the first urban design conference was held at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design in 1956, its participants including Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Victor Gruen And Edmund Bacon. Its organiser, Jose Luis Sert, announced urban design as a new academic field, which he defined as 'the part of planning concerned with the physical form of the city'. The first university course in urban design was established at Harvard in 1960. Lewis Mumford wrote in 1957 from the USA accusing FJ Osborn (in a letter to him) of identifying new towns with 'only one kind of urban design'. In 1959 the American Institute of Planners' policy statement on urban renewal stated: 'Renewal offers an opportunity to secure superior urban design when relatively large areas of land are improved under coordinated design leadership, and relatively uniform site and building controls'.
The American Institute of Architecture established a Committee on Urban Design in 1960 and it published Paul D Spreiregen's book Urban Design: the architecture of cities and towns in 1965. The Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University) was established in 1972. The UK Urban Design Group was formed in 1978. Punter and Carmona note that in the UK the term urban design 'had been conspicuous by its absence' in government publications and guidance until the publication of John Gummer's Quality in Town and Country in 1994.
The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions gave a definition (in Planning Policy Guidance Note 1) that was broad in describing what urban design covered but, despite its length, said little about what sort of activity urban design was. Urban design, said PPG1, was 'the relationship between different buildings; the relationships between buildings and the streets, squares, parks, waterways and other spaces which make up the public realm; the relationship of one part of a village, town or city with other parts; patterns of movement and activity which are thereby established; in short, the complex relationship between all the elements of built and unbuilt space.'
