Urban Design ARCH 4325

Course description:

This course covers the fundamentals of urban design, as they relate to all scales of the built environment - including regions, cities, districts, neighborhoods, blocks and parcels - and will reinforce the basics of sound community planning. By focusing on the neighborhood and the public space as the essential building blocks, this course explores how public spaces have changed, and how the advent of the automobile, rapid suburbanization, and previous traditions have posed challenges for today’s urban designers.Address how to analyze contexts of the urban design, how to apply its principles, how the design process might create new areas and the fundamentals of existing ones, in addition to why connectivity and walkability are crucial factors to healthy communities.Its content addresses the question of how urban designer has a positive impact on the design of a city without designing buildings, and what tools are available to implement urban design plans and policies. Lastly, through three student projects, this course will introduce urban studio techniques and technologies and build presentation skills.

Course Aims:

This course aims to:
  • Understand the urban structure, urban fabric, together with blocks’ arrangments and their relations to urban void.
  • Study urban design theories and their applications.
  • Explore urban strategies in relations to space function and its configuration, pedestrian movements and vehicle circulation, including road intersections and traffic calming measures.
  • Introduce the “ideas of the city” and its components that shapes the urban space, forms, structure and design of public realms. 
  • Analyse some of similar projects (as case studies) and urban programs developed during the period from the Industrial Revolution to the first half of 20th Century.
  • Present to the students the main concepts concerned with the development and design of urban entities by using an analytical approach aimed at describing urban elements, which have shaped urban spaces in time.

Course outcomes:

The students upon completion of this course would be able to:
  • Apply the basic of urban design.
  • Gain practice in the basic skills of urban design analysis.
  • Gain an appreciation of both the process and product of the design of the built environment.
  • Emphasize the need for planners to learn design, and designers to learn planning; to provide practice in visual, graphic and spatial literacy.