Urban design is the process of designing and shaping the physical features of cities, towns, and villages and planning for the provision of municipal services to residents and visitors. Although it deals with issues of a larger scale than architecture, it cannot be understood as a wholly separated field of research and design, since the quality of one depends on the quality of the other. In fact, it is this very interdependency, which has been termed relational design by Barcelona-based architect Enric Massip-Bosch, which makes urban design and architecture inextricably linked in many university education programs, especially in Europe. This tendency towards reintegration in architectural studies is also gaining momentum in the USA.
A landscape architect is a person who is educated in the field of landscape architecture. The practice of landscape architecture includes: site analysis, site inventory, site planning, land planning, planting design, grading, storm water management, sustainable design, construction specification and ensuring that all plans meet the current building codes and local and federal ordinances. The title landscape architect was first used by Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City's Central Park.
In the engineering and social sciences, the term built environment, or built world, refers to the human-made environment that provides the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings to cities and beyond. It has been defined as "the human-made space in which people live, work and recreate on a day-to-day basis."
The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment is the academic centre for the study of the built environment at University College London (UCL), part of the University of London in London, United Kingdom. It is home to twelve departments that have expertise in individual fields of the built-environment, including the Bartlett School of Architecture, Bartlett School of Planning, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Bartlett is consistently ranked the highest in Europe and the UK and among the highest in the world for the "Architecture and the Built-Environment" category in all major rankings. In the 2019 QS World University Rankings, it was ranked first in the world, but fell to third in the 2020 Rankings.
The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) was an executive non-departmental public body of the UK government, established in 1999. It was funded by both the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Communities and Local Government. It was merged into the Design Council on 1 April 2011.
The Environment and Planning journals are five academic journals. They are described as "interdisciplinary", though they have a highly spatial focus, meaning that they are of most interest to human geographers and city planners. The journals are also of interest to the scholars of economics, sociology, political science, urban planning, architecture, ecology and cultural studies.
Sustainable landscape architecture is a category of sustainable design concerned with the planning and design of the built and natural environments.
The Prince's Foundation is an educational charity established in 1986 by Charles, Prince of Wales to teach and demonstrate in practice those principles of traditional urban design and architecture which put people and the communities of which they are part at the centre of the design process.
Architecture in Star Wars includes the cities, buildings, ships, and other structures of the fictional Star Wars universe as described and depicted in books, movies, comics, and cartoons. Architects Journal ranked the top 10, including the Death Star and the Jedi Temple.
The Driehaus Architecture Prize, fully named The Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame, is a global award to honor a major contributor in the field of contemporary vernacular and classical architecture. The Driehaus Prize was conceived as an alternative to the predominantly modernist Pritzker Prize.
The Cafu Engine is a game engine developed by Carsten Fuchs. It is portable across platforms and runs on Windows and Linux, with plans to be adapted to OS X. The engine's source code is freely available under the MIT Licence.
Sir Terry Farrell is a British architect and urban designer. In 1980, after working 15 years in partnership with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Farrell founded his own firm, Farrells. He garnered a strong reputation for contextual urban design schemes, as well as exuberant works of postmodernism such as the MI6 Building. In 1991 his practice expanded internationally, opening an office in Hong Kong. In Asia his firm designed KK100 in Shenzhen, the tallest building ever designed by a British architect, as well as Guangzhou South railway station, once the largest railway station in Asia.
Ecological urbanism draws from ecology to inspire an urbanism that is more socially inclusive and sensitive to the environment. It is less ideologically driven, than green urbanism or sustainable urbanism. In many ways, ecological urbanism is an evolution of, and a critique of, Landscape Urbanism arguing for a more holistic approach to the design and management of cities. This type of urbanism has a central scope four main objectives, compactness, complexity, efficiency and stability. This model of Urbanism has as a goal to tackle the current challenges of society by intertwining sustainability and urban occupation models. The term appeared first in 1998 as "EcoUrbanism" in a book by Architect and Planner Miguel Ruano, who defined it as "the development of multi-dimensional sustainable human communities within harmonious and balanced built environments". The term was used later in April 2003 at a conference at the University of Oregon, and again in 2006 in a paper by Jeffrey Hou. The phrase was used by Mohsen Mostafavi in 2007 in Intervention Architecture and in a lecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, ecological urbanism as a project was largely started at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, with a conference, and exhibition, and book.
Reinier de Graaf is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and writer. He is a Partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded by Rem Koolhaas, and author of the book Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession.
Farrells is an architecture and urban design firm founded by British architect-planner Terry Farrell with offices in London, Manchester, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The firm has won numerous awards for their characteristic mixed-use schemes, transit-oriented development, contextual urban placemaking, and cultural buildings.
Lionel John March was a British mathematician, architect and digital artist, perhaps best known for his early pioneering of computer-aided architecture and art.
Hostile architecture is an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide or restrict behaviour in order to prevent crime and maintain order. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, such as youth and the homeless, by restricting the physical behaviours in which they can engage. Also known as defensive architecture, hostile design, unpleasant design, exclusionary design, and defensive urban design, the term hostile architecture is often associated with "anti-homeless spikes" – studs embedded in flat surfaces to make sleeping on them uncomfortable and impractical. Other measures include sloped window sills to stop people sitting; benches with armrests positioned to stop people lying on them, and water sprinklers that "intermittently come on but aren't really watering anything." Hostile architecture is also employed to deter skateboarding, littering, loitering, and public urination.
Urban planning, also known as regional planning, town planning, city planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks and their accessibility. Traditionally, urban planning followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements. The primary concern was the public welfare, which included considerations of efficiency, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, as well as effects of the master plans on the social and economic activities. Over time, urban planning has adopted a focus on the social and environmental bottom-lines that focus on planning as a tool to improve the health and well-being of people while maintaining sustainability standards. Sustainable development was added as one of the main goals of all planning endeavors in the late 20th century when the detrimental economic and the environmental impacts of the previous models of planning had become apparent.. Similarly, in the early 21st century, Jane Jacob's writings on legal and political perspectives to emphasize the interests of residents, businesses and communities effectively influenced urban planners to take into broader consideration of resident experiences and needs while planning.
Jos Boys is an architect, activist, educator, and writer. She was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and co-author of their 1984 book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Since 2008 she has been co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project with disabled artist Zoe Partington, a disability-led platform that works with disabled artists to explore new ways to think about disability in architectural and design discourse and practice.
Jonathan Manns is a British town planner and surveyor. He is a writer, speaker, educator and campaigner on built environment issues.
