Urban Design aims to shape, manage and improve the quality of the urban environments. Urban design aims to create urban environments that are livable, beautiful and sustainable. Urban design is the process of designing and shaping the physical features of cities and towns and planning for the provision of services. This process has a large scale focus; on groups of buildings, infrastructure, streets and public spaces, whole neighbourhoods, cities and districts. Urban design is interdisciplinary. It embraces elements from a wide range of built environment professions: landscape architecture, urban planning, architecture, civil engineering and municipal engineering.
"Urban design is allied to architecture and planning. For its practice it requires some of the skills and knowledge of both disciplines. The subject matter of urban design is the arrangement of many buildings so that they form a single composition. The designs may cover more than one site and involve many owners, users and government agencies" Moughtin (2003) p. 2
Urban design embraces a wide range of subjects from physical geography to social science, and an appreciation of diverse disciplines, such as real estate development, urban economics, political economy and social theory. It borrows from public administration, sociology, law, urban geography, urban economics and other related disciplines from the social and behavioural sciences, as well as from natural and ecological sciences.
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