ABSTRACT
Urban design is a term that means different things to different people. The City of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, indicates that ‘urban design is the discipline through which planning and architecture can create or renew a sense of local pride and identity’ and that it ‘is concerned with bringing different disciplines responsible for the components of cities into a unified vision’. Urban design is the visual and sensory relationship between people and the built and natural environment. The difficulties of aesthetics are great at both the practical and the philosophical levels, yet in simple terms, Americans like their neighborhoods to be pleasant and attractive, free of noxious intrusions. The majority of courts today hold that the police power can be used for aesthetic purposes, whether these have the ulterior purpose of promoting some other public good such as tourism or economic development or for ‘pure’ aesthetic objectives. Billboard regulation continues to make headlines across the United States.
