Peculiarities of Urban Design - Coursework Example

Urban design Urban design is the process of shaping and designing cities, towns and remote areas. Unlike architecture urban design focuses on the whole scope of the chosen topic e.g. an entire city or an entire town in order to make urban areas functional and attractive. Urban design involves the understanding of a wide range of discipline ranging from social science and physical geography. It is about making links or connections between people and places with distinct beauty and identity using strands of environmental stewardship, place making and economic viability Public realm is the situation whereby the public owns pathways, streets, parks, open spaces accessible publicly and right of ways. It also means the public has open access to all areas, work operations in the public realm include; cleaning of the streets, street lighting maintenance, cutting of grass and horticulture. This is done in order for residents and people visiting places to feel better about their surrounding areas. Public realm is put in effect to make a city or a town cleaner and tidier by providing amenities such as flower displays, benches, open spaces, street lightings public washrooms and the like. The public perception is an important aspect as far as the public realm is concerned; therefore first things first designers should design according to their needs. In order to come up with a project to design an amenity, opinions from the public should be taken in effect either through questionnaires or any method of data taking. Also, another important aspect is the resources available at your disposal. Designing should involve amount of capital at your disposal rather than being overzealous with a project that is beyond the capital rich. Designers should pay attention to public realm because it is a form of behaviour setting, in that it is a set of interwoven and nested hierarchy. There are two types of behaviour setting the first one is the links between them and the second one is places of localised activities behaviour setting existing in a place defines the culture of society from which they are from. It is important for urban designers to identify the value of the richness of the standing pattern of behaviour carried by all segments of the population which is considered as their clients. They should also put into consideration those behaviour that are likely to exist, and add to the richness of the population and serve as educative environments for all the people in the community which include adults and children alike. Public realm should be given attention as a display in that messages about the nature of a society are communicated through the physical forms and patterns. The display is an important aspect of contribution to a people’s feelings of self worth and sense of identity. People take pride of the modernism, newness, of the appearance of their surrounding, even if it does not fully cater their needs on other dimensions Accessibility and mobility within the urban environment is usually dictated by the layout and design of the public realm. Perceptual barriers set into effect when pedestrian confidence is deprived due to problems of safety and crimes created by poor design and layout of buildings. This can be reduced if designers take their time to lay down a concrete plan on how to cub such situations. If the population are to feel safe in their immediate surrounding then investments will not be a problem. The techniques and strategies used by designers to enhance the public realm are to conserve places and precincts of identified cultural heritage significance. This is done through a number of ways which include; supporting the restoration of heritage buildings and places protect significant public open space, valued historic buildings and the subdivision pattern within the heritage precincts, protect heritage significant trees featured in parks and heritage areas. Another technique and strategy used by designers is to reinforce an areas unique sense of place and physical identity by ensuring that new development respects the hierarchy of streets, maintaining the subdivision pattern and the grid layout of little streets, protecting and enhancing character and pedestrian function of laneway and laneway system, ensuring that all new erected buildings add architectural aspects to the city’s skyline and streetscape and encouraging the orientation of buildings to align in accordance with the street pattern. Enhancing main roads and principal streets as entrances to the central city including ensuring that development along the city’s established areas and major avenues maintains and respects the prominence of their characterised landscape, ensuring character is reinforced through the development of principal streets as high quality into the city. Ensuring characteristics of stable areas are protected by new developments by; ensuring historic low scale of rear lanes is maintained in stable areas, ensuring development in the stable areas, ensuring management in the stable areas and urban renewal areas is perfected so that development in urban renewal areas respects established adjoining areas. Ensuring objectives of a locality are adhered to and met when new development kicks in the strategies used are; ensure development in a design and development overlay in areas where a specific built form outcome is identified, adhering to the relevant planning controls that support development in ongoing change areas, encouraging a consistent scale of local centres and encouraging residential development in urban areas to be medium to high density. Ensuring physical and social activities are supported by the public realm by; making sure tall buildings designed provides a human scale at street level, ensuring people of all abilities and ages are able to use parks, pedestrian paths and public spaces safely, ensuring in the middle of the day sunlight is able to be accessed by outdoor spaces appropriate to their role and function, ensuring that the adverse effects of wind down drafts and wind protection in public and private outdoors spaces is minimised by the development Ensuring the quality and amenity of the public realm is enhanced by; ensuring frontage brought to all streets and public places is positive and attractive with new building developments, ensuring the scale and bulk brought by new development is appropriate to the scale of the public realm, ensuring that the diverse needs of the community are catered for by encouraging the provision of a diversity of a public space and avoiding projections into the public realm not unless they provide a significant contribution design and amenity of the space. Some of the major challenges that urban designers face in the public realm are they are expected to produce more with less amount of capital or resources at their disposal. The bodies involved with a specific project tend to search for inexpensive work hence the quality of the work is not up to standard. This is because when you want quality work it is unlikely it is going to be cheap Designing has become a high technology profession therefore it is important for designers to stay up to date with the changing world of technological advancement. It is almost impossible to keep up with proactively changing trends though it is a vital trend in order to stay competitive in the real world. Some of the designers are employed because of their ability to copy and not their creativity, areas nowadays seem to like all look alike in that the ideas from an area are expressed in another area. One example of a successful public realm is the Wycombe district in Buckinghamshire in south central England (Chisholm. (1911). It is administered by a council which is Wycombe district council the district was formed on 1st April 1972 in the town of high Wycombe. The forming of this district was as a result of the merger of three districts namely Marlow urban district, Wycombe rural district and High Wycombe. In the public ream action plan draft 19th October 2011 its responsibilities were paving materials, street lighting, traffic lights, road signs, security satisfactory reinstatement following STATS works among others these are to improve the public realm of the district. The district also has policies governing their trees and hedges a Tree Preservation Order (TPO) it helps in the planning and controlling that make important contribution within the Wycombe district. This policy stipulates that it is illegal to cut down trees or damage a tree protected by TPO without their consent. Wycombe covers an area of approximately 324.57km2 with a population of 164800 as estimated in 2010 and a population density of 510/km2. Cape Town is one of the cities that is an example of a less successful public realm. This is so because of the way they engage with informal and formal public space, the parking lot, traffic circles, alleyways and the streets. This city has a rich tradition of events taking in the streets their annual minstrels carnival, the FIFA fan walk during the 2010 world cup which was very successful although not as successful afterwards. Authorities in Cape Town are bringing about opposition not knowing that increased activity in the public places promotes vastly a safer public realm. Therefore this city’s administration should embrace the ways of the people in order to have a successful public realm (Barnett, 2000) Reference Barnett, J. (2000), An Introduction to Urban Design, New York: Harper & Row. Read More