Designing Cities

Good urban design rests on planning principles that must satisfy practical requirements while also uniting individual elements into a coherent whole. Many of the underlying compositional rules have stayed the same over time. This manual surveys the key approaches to designing and presenting urban projects, drawing on historical precedents alongside recent international competition entries from firms such as Foster + Partners, KCAP Architects & Planners, MVRDV and OMA.

At its heart is the question of how these projects were actually developed and which methods and tools the designers had at their disposal. One example is parametric design, where adjustable variables automatically shape the outcome and produce a range of possible solutions.