Urban structure appears to be one of the leading issues in the poll about the most important facets of urban design. But what is urban structure anyway? This post aims to open the discussion about urban structure…

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Dear Mr. Schäfer, how would you define Urban Design?
Urban design includes all the efforts building a city and its community, all the planning to make cities liveable.

In your opinion, what are the goals of Urban Design?
Urban Design is constructing and designing the urban landscape. Urban Design brings together different and various disciplines like architecture and sociology, buildings and open spaces, infrastructure and culture.

Can you generalize about the contributions that Urban Designers bring to cities?
This means to describe precisely the jobs mentioned in the previous answer. How to design the city and parts of it to meet the needs of individuals and groups as well as of the whole community.

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PerfectCity wants to connect bloggers from all over the world and foster the international dialogue concerning the future of our cities. For that reason, and in the course of the development of the Charter City of the Future , PerfectCity developed an interview-like questionnaire that can be filled-in here.

Completed questionnaires may be published on www.perfectcity.net, so that readers from all over the world can get to know each other and will gain interesting insights into different opinions, visions and attitudes. In the focus of the newly developed interview is issue no.1, Urban Design. We are looking forward to reading your interviews!

Not enough? If you feel to say more, you may also register here and become an author to write and publish articles on perfectcity.net. We are looking forward to your active participation in the development of the PerfectCity Charter and the discussion about the future of our cities.

I came across an interesting paper on Shared Space written by Ben Hamilton-Baillie in August 2006. It describes this emerging approach to urban design. According to Hamilton-Baillie, the approach of Shared Space touches on how to reduce the negative impacts of traffic in cities. As an approach to urban design, Shared Space may hold interesting thought for the development of the PerfectCity Charter City of the Future…

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The project What makes Shanghai Addictive  is both event and exhibition and challenges the audience to satisfy their obsession to unique motifs and urban art. The basic idea is as simple as interesting: 14 Shanghai based graphic designers and artists asked themselves what makes Shanghai addictive and converted their ideas in a (photo)graphic way. What becomes clear is that there are many ways to see Shanghai…

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In the light of the development of the Charter City of the Future, this remark on Urban Design and environment aims to broaden the discussion and provide some inspiration for further thoughts. Considering that more than half of the human population will be living in urban areas by 2008 - and this trend is increasing - environmental issues are gaining importance. But where does "Green Urban Design" start and where does it end?

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Environmental planning and management is meant to guide and control human use of resources and interaction with the environment, in order to be able to impose some certain restriction on the use of space and land resources, and to ensure that the environments intrinsic quality is not adversely affected. In other words, it is a conscious process of making decisions that are geared towards safeguarding resources from abuse or misuse by humans.

The overall goal is to ensure the sustainability of the use of the natural and human environments. In the same vein, the notion of sustainability implies that humans derive the maximum benefit from the environment, both economically and socially while at the same time maintaining its intrinsic quality. Thus, the concept of sustainable development simply implies that we must meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs.

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