Purposes+of+Urban+Design

==What's the purpose of urban planning? ==


==What should urban designers be concerned with? ==

==Why are so many places so badly designed? == 

===I believe the main purpose of Urban Design consists in creating not only beautiful but also functional environments that provide us comfort, security and quality of life in general. As Teresa Almeida said, “it’s the art of making places” and its work field goes far beyond a singular building: it involves the whole dynamic between every single structure that composes a city, a village or maybe a neighborhood. ===

===If we take a look to, for example, Caracas as a capital, many of us might have a negative opinion about how it was design. Since our small city is actually a valley and has a lot of habitants, people had to start building their own shelters on the slopes of the mountains and that was the beginning of an urban chaos, especially when this task wasn't assigned to an expert in the field at the moment. I don’t consider Caracas was badly planned, I think it wasn’t planned at all and that’s the real issue. It’s true that urban planners must take into consideration many factors at the moment of creating environments (since it’s not only putting building in some random location) and sometimes work based on what is already built, but they also have to predict how their decisions will influence the upcoming generations: “Will this still be functional in the future?” ===