ABSTRACT
Part Seven focuses on urban design – the way in which humans actually shape the built environment. Urban designers are usually trained as architects with further training in urban design, city and regional planning, or both. They focus on the design of sites larger than individual buildings – site plans for one or more buildings, blocks, neighborhoods, park systems, highway corridors, or even entire new towns. Professionals from the related field of landscape architecture are educated to manage the relationship between the natural environment and the built environment. As in other areas where academics study cities or professionals work to build cities, material from many disciplines and professional fields is relevant to urban design. Urban designers blend artistic right-brain approaches and rational left-brain functions. The best designers are also social scientists who study how people use the environments they are designing. They may draw on psychology to understand how people perceive the space around them and interact with other people, history to understand how the physical form of a place evolved, and anthropology and sociology to create places that meet the needs of different social groups. Urban designers use computer assisted design (CAD) and illustration software. They use the full gamut of qualitative and quantitative research methods social scientists and urban planners use.
