Geographical Information Systems and Urban Design

Urban design has been defined as “the process of giving physical design direction to urban growth, onservation and change” (Barnett 1982, p. 12). It sits at the interface between architecture and planning, and its emphasis on physical attributes usually restricts its scale of operation to arrangements of streets, buildings, and landscapes. In one sense, urban design represents the heartland of city planning from whence the activity sprung in the late nineteenth century as civic or town design in a social context, but since the 1950s, planning has dramatically broadened its embrace to include many socio-economic facets of the city. Consequently urban design has become a much smaller activity in the portfolio of urban planning activities, many of which are no longer exclusively concerned with the physical environment. However, traditional definitions of urban design still hold. In terms of residential design, Gibberd (1953) says: “The term ‘design’ ...... means the arrangement of the various parts — the houses, roads, paths and so on — in such a way that they function properly, can be built economically, and give pleasure to look at.” (p. 20). This implies that urban design includes technical questions of urban functioning, economic issues of cost and benefit, aesthetic issues of appearance, as well as social issues involving allocation and provision. As in mainstream urban planning, urban design represents a synthesis of diverse activities involving social science and architecture. Indeed, there is a trend to interpreting urban design as being part of a much broader context which is almost, but not quite, synonymous with urban planning itself (Punter and Carmona 1997).