Urban Design Quiz

1. Provide a short de nition of the term Urban Design.

Urban design is the appliance of thinking about the relationship between people, places,
movement and other factors to bring a vision to life.

2. What are the di erences between architecture, urban design, and urban
planning?

The main distinction between them is the scale that you work at. While architecture
handles individual buildings, urban design focuses on blocks of buildings and their
surroundings. Urban planning is more about the functionality of the area and focuses on
even bigger places like towns or cities. Architecture and urban design treats their space
both vertically and horizontally while urban planning is done in a 2D perspective, since its
focuses is in functionality (Ma, 2023).

3. Brie y describe what Urban Morphology is?

Urban Morphology is the study of how and why cities transform over time. It’s done by
analysing patterns in expansion and evolution of buildings and streets. It’s also an
analysis of why cities are composed in the way they are (Carmona, 2021).

4. Name ve aspects of the site analysis.

They are as follows; Historical analysis, Building and land usage, circulation analysis,
ecological analysis, environmental behaviour analysis (Ma, 2023).

5. Name six urban design dimensions.

According to (Carmona, 2021) it’s temporal, perceptual, morphological, visual, social and
functional.

6. What are Lynch’s ve basic elements?

Lynch talks about two key aspects which he uses when working with urban imagery. They
are legibility, which is how people orientate and navigate through cities, and imageability,
which is the quality of an object to give meaning to observers. The main elements that
had these aspects were paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.

7. Describe Gordon Cullen’s approach.

According to (Carmona, 2021) Cullen’s approach is the idea that people often experience
cities while moving and therefore cities should be planned in regards to that. When
travelling towards a destination people will experience views by both concealment and
revelation. This creates a denial and reward system which makes the experience of a city
exciting and enriching. To heighten this experience areas can be designed to enhance
areas visually.

8. Name four visualisation techniques, explain what are the main aspects in each
one of the techniques.
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The four visualisation techniques that are most prominent in my courses would be CAD,
models, game engines and sketches. Sketches are used in all architecture courses to get
an early visual idea of the project. Later on the other techniques would be used to get a
better and nal design. The biggest di erence is just how you want the nal product to be
viewed and experienced.

Sources

Carmona, M. (2021). Public Places Urban Spaces : The Dimensions of Urban Design
(Third edition). Routlidge.

Ma, J. (230123). Urban Analysis. Luleå tekniska universitet. le:///Users/niclasfrykgard/

Downloads/01-23%20Urban%20Analysis-Jing.pdf
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