The art of designing and designing cities and communities is known as urban design. Buildings, public spaces, transportation networks, services, and amenities are all part of the process of urban architecture. It’s the process of giving buildings, entire neighborhoods, and the city structure, shape, and personality. It’s a system for organizing the components into a network of streets, squares, and blocks.
To make urban environments practical and appealing, urban design combines architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning.
Designing and planning cities | Urban Architecture
While the two areas are closely connected, urban design varies from urban planning in that it focuses on the physical enhancement of the public environment, whereas urban planning tends to focus on the management of private growth through established planning methodologies and programs, as well as other statutory development constraints.
The application of design, as well as design philosophy and design research, has evolved in recent years. The design has evolved to mean more than just shape and aesthetics; it is now a critical component of commercial innovation as well as a variety of social development processes. When firms develop new goods and services, a designer’s ability to combine, for example, design with user comprehension and overall solutions is rapidly becoming a competitive characteristic.
A growing number of countries are investing in design to improve their worldwide image, boost consumer awareness of the importance of design and product quality, and pique local industry’s interest in the benefits of design for business success. Furthermore, several of these countries have invested in improving their design educational institutions as well as their design research capacities.
Evolution of Urban Architecture
When seen from a long-term historical perspective, city space has always performed three important functions: meeting place, marketplace, and connecting point. The city provided possibilities for the social sharing of all types of knowledge as a gathering place. The city served as a marketplace for the exchange of goods and services. Finally, public areas provided access to and links between all of the city’s tasks. A city committed mostly to working and basic requirements has been changed into a city of leisure and enjoyment in only a few decades. (Gehl and colleagues, 2006)
The tale of a survey among individuals in Copenhagen’s city center is presented in New City Life by prominent Danish architect Jan Gehl et al. (2006). “What is your principal motive for being in Copenhagen’s city center?” was the major question. At two points in time, the reaction was measured. The first was in the 1970s when “shopping” was the answer. Later in 2005, the most common response was “being in the city.” As a result, the conclusion was that city space is a goal in and of itself, a valuable asset in and of itself.
According to Gehl et al. (2006), during the last 40 years, more people have used the center city and have spent more time there, including evenings and weekends when stores are frequently closed. Overall, this is a remarkable and dramatic transformation that provides lessons for other cities looking to improve their public areas to enliven and enrich the urban experience.
To Make Cities More Adaptive, An Urban Design Concept
To increase the success of urban architectural adaptation, it is necessary to consider urban design through the lens of co-creation, in which the built environment engages in a two-way dialogue with residents to maximize urban design for the city’s evolutionary progression. This urban design idea requires city planners and architects to construct structures that optimize themselves over time by responding to the population’s changing demands, difficulties, and ambitions (for both individuals and the collective).
To do this, such urban architecture must work as a “bridge” that allows residents to influence and change the design of the city in real-time. Emerging technologies may be utilized to harness the sensemaking of data from civil actions, ideas, and experience insights to build such a bridge. Augmented reality, where the virtual may intersect with the actual in new ways, is one such technology that can immensely aid this effort.
Fusing Virtual And Physical In The Urban Design Process | Urban Architecture
As cities’ urban architecture evolves, a new sort of fluid flexibility will develop to elevate human life above ordinary well-being to higher degrees of thrivability. The two-way conversation between urban architecture and residents establishes a framework in which residents may not only benefit from the excellent design but can also benefit from their surroundings in new and more creative ways. This produces a positive feedback loop that improves urban living by increasing the beauty, utility and underlying culture of the city.
The goal is to use developing technology, such as augmented reality, to unlock the new opportunities it provides. As a result, not only can urban architecture serve occupiers more innovatively on an individual level, but it may also serve large metropolitan regions more innovatively as a whole.
The capacity to use urban architecture to deliver better degrees of thrivability to inhabitants is radically altered when it is viewed as the outcome of a co-creation design process. The city becomes a more joyful, peaceful, healthy, and inspirational place to live by incorporating citizen ideas, behaviors, and experience insights into how such urban systems and aspects adapt. This is how urban design can assist cities in reaching these higher levels: by drawing on the knowledge and inventiveness of their population via buildings that operate as a bridge between people and the city.
This is the co-creation process that urban planners, architects, and government officials may employ strategically to guarantee that cities assist inhabitants in not just achieving comfort, but also thriving, as the city adapts to their unique requirements, difficulties, and aspirations. This is a city that pays attention, thinks, and acts.
References
LORENA LEHMAN, M., 2021. Urban Architecture – A Design Process of Co-Creation. [online] Maria Lorena Lehman | MLL Atelier. Available at: <https://www.marialorenalehman.com/blog/urban-architecture/> [Accessed 16 May 2021].
EUKN. 2021. Urban Design, how important is it for cities?. [online] Available at: <https://www.eukn.eu/eu-presidencies/danish-eu-presidency/urban-design/urban-design-how-important-is-it-for-cities/> [Accessed 16 May 2021].
