IN-PERSON London. Section A

Abstract

Urban design is often, even usually, thought of as a practice focusing at the immediate scale of the street, the square, the urban quarter. It is at this local scale that people experience the urban design qualities of the cities in which they live, work and play. Specialist urban designers, architects, landscape architects, planners, other professionals, and communities collaborate to produce these local urban design outcomes. Meanwhile, the dominant urban form that has evolved since the late twentieth century is the polycentric city region, in which contiguous and non-contiguous cities, towns and suburbs constitute larger interrelated urban entities. In parallel with the rise of this new urban form, planning documents formerly known as metropolitan plans and regional plans are evolving to address the new polycentric city region more effectively. These new planning instruments need to work as multiscalar urban design instruments to simultaneously shape urban form and quality at scales ranging from the very local, up through town centres of various scales and intensities, to the broader ecological region underlying the city region. This paper draws on literature and practice to position urban design on a continuum between the local, sub-regional and regional scales in regional planning. An international selection of regional planning documents for major city regions – in Europe, North America, the United Kingdom and Australia – is examined to investigate the extent to which these plans act as urban design instruments at various urban scales.