Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. The scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas. Urban designers connect the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning to better organize physical space and community environments.
Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically accessible to the public; it is installed in public space in both outdoor and indoor settings. Public art seeks to embody public or universal concepts rather than commercial, partisan, or personal concepts or interests. Notably, public art is also the direct or indirect product of a public process of creation, procurement, and/or maintenance.
Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan's first female architect. She is best known for her involvement in the intersection of architecture and social justice. Since her official retirement from architectural practice in 2000, her UN-recognized NGO Heritage Foundation Pakistan has been taking on humanitarian relief work and historical conservation projects in rural villages all around Pakistan. She was awarded the prestigious Fukuoka Prize in 2016 and the RIBA's Royal Gold Medal in 2023.
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) is the architecture school of Columbia University, a private research university in New York City. It is regarded as an important and prestigious architecture school. It is also home to the Masters of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design, Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, Urban Design, and Urban Planning.
A sustainable city, eco-city, or green city is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 defines sustainable cities as those that are dedicated to achieving green sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability. They are committed to doing so by enabling opportunities for all through a design focused on inclusivity as well as maintaining a sustainable economic growth. The focus will also includes minimizing required inputs of energy, water, and food, and drastically reducing waste, output of heat, air pollution – CO2, methane, and water pollution. Richard Register, a visual artist, first coined the term ecocity in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, where he offers innovative city planning solutions that would work anywhere. Other leading figures who envisioned sustainable cities are architect Paul F Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Pty Ltd, as well as authors Timothy Beatley and Steffen Lehmann, who have written extensively on the subject. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.
Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was an architectural and art historian. Originally a German citizen, she accompanied her second husband, the Hungarian Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, in his move to the United States. She was the author of a study of his work, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, plus several other books on architectural history.
Mitchell Joachim is an architect and urban designer. He is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE, and an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Previously he was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto and a faculty member at Pratt, Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, The New School, and the European Graduate School.
Paul F Downton is a sustainable city theorist and activist, ecological architect, urbanist and professional writer on architecture, ecocities, environment and the arts.
Susan Morton Blaustein is an American feminist, international development practitioner, professor, and philanthropist. She is the founder and executive director at WomenStrong International which invests in local women's organizations worldwide, brings them together to learn and share, and amplifies their solutions to improve the lives of urban women and families and to advance progress toward gender equality. Blaustein, who also teaches at Columbia University, was previously a journalist and foreign policy analyst focused on international human rights issues, and a prizewinning American composer, with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Galen Cranz is a Professor of the Graduate School, Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social and cultural bases of architectural and urban design. She is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, a kinesthetic educational system, who founded the new field "Body Conscious Design."
The contributions of women in climate change have received increasing attention in the early 21st century. Feedback from women and the issues faced by women have been described as "imperative" by the United Nations and "critical" by the Population Reference Bureau. A report by the World Health Organization concluded that incorporating gender-based analysis would "provide more effective climate change mitigation and adaptation."
Soumya Swaminathan Yadav is an Indian paediatrician and clinical scientist known for her research on tuberculosis and HIV. From 2019 to 2022, she served as the chief scientist at the World Health Organization under the leadership of Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Previously, from October 2017 to March 2019, she was the Deputy Director General of Programmes (DDP) at the World Health Organization.
Tatiana Bilbao Spamer is a Mexican architect whose works often merged geometry with nature. Her practice focuses on sustainable design and social housing.
Karla Maria S. Rothstein is an American architect and adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is also the founder and director of Columbia University's trans-disciplinary DeathLAB Rothstein is also the co-founder of Latent Productions, an architecture, research, and development firm in New York City, which she co-founded in 1999 with Salvatore Perry. A significant focus of her architecture practice, research, and teaching has been redefining urban spaces of death and remembrance.
Richard Plunz is an American architect, critic, and historian. He is Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in the City of New York and the Founder and Director of the Urban Design Lab, a research unit of Columbia's Earth Institute, where he also serves as professor.
Yakisugi is a traditional Japanese method of wood preservation. It is referred to in the West as burnt timber cladding and is also available as shou sugi ban (焼杉板), a term which uses the same kanji characters but an alternative pronunciation. The ban character means "plank".
Louise Harpman is a New York–based architect, urban designer, teacher, and author. She is a Professor of Architecture, Urban Design, and Sustainability at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the founding principal of the design and research practice, Louise Harpman__PROJECTS. She was previously a founder and principal of the architecture and design firm, Specht Harpman.
Kotchakorn Voraakhom is a Thai landscape architect and chief executive officer of Porous City Network, a social enterprise that looks to increase urban resilience in Southeast Asia. She is also the founder of the Koungkuey Design Initiative, which works with communities to rebuild public spaces. She campaigns for more green space in cities and is a 2018 TED fellow.
Urban vitality is the quality of spaces in cities that attract diverse groups of people for varied activities over frequent, varied times. These spaces may be perceived as alive, lively or vibrant, in contrast with low-vitality areas, which may repel people and be perceived as unsafe.
