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.

What is your field of practice/interest in Urban Design?
I am editor of Topos – The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design. We cover this issues and matters in presenting projects and best practice from all over the world. Within our work, there is no academic distinction between the disciplines since the landscape stands in the foreground. There are problems to be solved in the use of landscape and in the growth of urban settlements. So the skills of everybody is needed, no matter which label single professions would have.

What distinguishes this field from others in the urban context?
Hard to say, may be Urban Design is not existing on ist own at all, Urban Designs brings together architecture, landscape architecture, sociology, politics and so on.

Is Urban Design able to make cities „fit for future“?
The future will present challenges for mankind. Most important will be to deal with water shortage, sustainable energy sources, food supply. Since the majority is living in urban environments, Urban Design might play an important integrative role.

What are the information sources for Urban Designers?
All kind of media distributed around the world. There are so many specializations that many specialists will search for their special information. There is more media available those days than you can digest. Quite often the problem only is, to know where the information is available and to implement it at the right spot fort he right purpose.

Dear Mr. Schäfer, thank you very much for this interview!

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