Purposes

 Urban design is the process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages. It is the art of making places. It involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and establishing the processes that make successful development possible. The fact that 84 per cent of planning applications are drawn up by someone with no design training may have something to do with it. But being trained in design does not necessarily mean that the person responsible for the development will designing something that might make a successful place. After all, they may not have seen that as their job. They may have been thinking only of limited and short-term aims: to build something that the developer can sell quickly; or to serve the building’s users, rather than making a more pleasant experience for people passing by.   Because there is no knowledge of what a built environment should communicat e      • provide settings for certain activities;  • remind people of what these activities are;  • signify power, status, or privacy;  • express and support cosmological beliefs;  • communicate information: help establish individual or group identity; and encode value systems;  • separate domain and differentiate between here and there, sacred and profane, men and women, front and back, private and public, habitable and uninhabitable, and so on. ||
 *  Podcast 1   **
 *  What is urban design?   **
 * Why are so many places so badly designed? **
 *  Podcast 2   **
 * ** Why do people create built environments of such elaborateness? **
 *  What are the possible purposes of architecture   ****<span style="font-size: 12pt; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> ?  **