This book explores how environmental urban design can benefit from established and emerging representation and simulation techniques that meet the need for a multisensory approach. Bringing together contributions by researchers and practicing professionals that approach the topics discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives and draw on case-study applications, it addresses important themes including digital modeling, physical modeling, mapping, and simulation. The chapters are linked by their relevance to simple but crucial questions: How can representational solutions enhance an urban design approach in which people’s well-being is considered the primary goal? How can one best represent and design the ambiance of places? What kinds of technologies and tools are available to support multisensory urban design? How can current and future environments be optimally represented and simulated, taking into account the way in which we experience places? Shedding new light on these key questions, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.

Beginning with a brief history of contemporary urban design, the book tracks urban design's roots in architecture and planning and identifies how and why it has emerged as a separate discipline. It then sets out the principles and key criteria that underpin urban design and explains how urban designers interpret policy, baseline data, and graphical analysis to present an understanding of place and space. The book concludes by highlighting a number of growing urban challenges facing cities today, discussing how urban design can play a leading role in tackling issues connected with climate change, globalisation, and technological advancements, and positively respond to the current and future needs of society.

While there is a rich array of urban theory, design, and representation books available, there is currently no book which brings together, in a single volume, urban design theory and new digital technologies in urban information mapping, modeling, and 3D simulation. Based on two decades of practicing and teaching architecture, author Brian McGrath's Digital Modelling for Urban Design explores the new theories and technologies of digital modelling, focusing on how to create moving and interactive 3D drawing, skills useful in the context of urban theory, and design and representation. Fully illustrated with original maps, 3D models, and drawings and photographs, this innovative work introduces digital modelling to students, architects, designers, and planners interested in the processes key to shaping the urban environment.

This introduction to the field of urban design offers a comprehensive survey of the processes necessary to implement urban design work, explaining the vocabulary, the rules, the tools, the structures, and the resources in clear and accessible style. Providing a comprehensive framework for understanding urban design principles and strategies, the author argues that urban design is both a process and a collaboration in which the different forces involved are knit together. Moving from the regional scale down to the scale of places, the book examines the goals and strategies of the urban designer from the viewpoints of the private sector, public sector, and community. The text is illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings that make theory and practice relevant and alive.

The edited volume explores the topic of experiential walks, which is the practice of multi- or mono-sensory and in-motion immersion into an urban or natural environment. The act of walking is hence intended as a process of (re-)discovering, reflecting and learning through an embodied experience. Specific attention is devoted to the investigation of the ambiance of places and its dynamic atmospheric perception that contribute to generating the social experience. This topic is gaining increasing attention and has been studied in several forms in different disciplines to investigate the particular spatial, social, sensory and atmospheric character of places. The book contains chapters by experts in the field and covers both the theory and the practice of innovative methods, techniques, and technologies. It examines experiential walks in the perspective of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental and sensory urban design by organising the contributions according to three specific interrelated focuses, namely the exploration and investigation of the multisensory dimension of public spaces, the different ways to grasp and communicate the in-motion experience through traditional and novel forms of representation, and the application of the approach to urban participatory planning and higher education. Shedding new light on the topic, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.

"What makes a city endure and prosper? In this masterful survey of a thousand years of urban architecture, Wolfgang Braunfels identifies certain themes common to cities as different as Siena and London, Munich and Venice ... Braunfels describes scores of cities, classifying them as cathedral cities, city-states, imperial cities, maritime cities, "ideal cities" (those towns which, planned by often absent rulers for a specefic purpose, failed to develop independent lives) ... Lavishly illustrated with city plans, bird's-eye views, early renderings, and modern photographs, Urban Design in Western Europe will both delight and instruct architects, urban planners, historians, and travelers."--Page 4 of cover

Architects and urban planners need to describe cities in the course of their work, be it through maps, diagrams, sketches, computer renderings or models. Drawing for Urban Design explores a wide range of ways to represent the city, from freehand sketching to sophisticated computer models. The book provides a practical introduction to these techniques for students while explaining the processes associated with describing and designing urban environments – it is an invaluable visual handbook for representing the contemporary city.