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In urban development, the difference of construction time series and the diversity of the aesthetic standard all lead to the fragmentation of the urban landscape and the lack of effective integration. The research on urban landscape design based on sustainable development innovation was put forward in this paper. The background of the development of urban landscape design was expounded firstly, and the development status of urban landscape design under the concept of sustainable development innovation was introduced; then the urban landscape design method under the concept of sustainable development was put forward, and the urban landscape planning and design of a city was taken as an example and divided into three functional areas; in addition, the stereoscopic traffic planning, the landscape corridor design and the landscape design planning of water system were proposed. This study is of certain guiding significance for the actual urban landscape planning design.

Urban design, in conjunction with the older, more established disciplines of architecture and town planning, is increasingly important in shaping the built environment. Urban designers are required to consider a broad array of issues, crime and safety being among them. For various practical and project-related reasons, crime and safety issues can be given cursory attention.

The paper is an invited opinion piece and comment based upon the specialist knowledge and expertise of the author working within the field of urban design.

Learning from environmental sustainability and the manner in which such issues are now routinely embedded into urban design processes, the paper argues that a combination of regulation (i.e. legislation, policies and design guidelines) and ongoing professional development for built environment professionals are required to ensure that crime and safety issues are given due consideration.

Practical examples will be used to illustrate this argument, including reference to a design guideline operating in New South Wales (Australia) and lessons learned (and challenges experienced) from a mixed-used development project in inner-Sydney.

Based on the new requirements of the rapid development of the national urbanization, planning adaptability and dynamic variability in the process of urban planning should be improved, which will become the focus of planning and design. Therefore, in this paper, the operating mechanism of transformation and upgrading of urban planning based on game theory was proposed. Firstly, the concept and development background of urban planning and operation were expounded, and the game theory was used to analyze the operating mechanism of urban planning; then, the formulation of urban planning based on the operation concept of urban planning was analyzed from the aspects of urban planning system, the overall development principle, the overall plan and the detailed planning; in addition, by taking the planning and design of the upgrading of a city as an example, the planning of blocks, urban parks and buildings and so on was achieved.

Finance is the core of the economy. For the construction of modern and innovative city, the development and function of finance can not be ignored. The research on urban planning and design based on financial support has become a hot topic. Based on this, the Grey relation analysis was used to study the modern financial support driven innovative urban planning and design. First of all, the progress of the innovative urban construction was expounded, and the progress of the research on the financial support innovative urban construction was introduced; then the content and financial planning of the innovative urban construction planning were put forward; in addition, taking the innovative urban planning and design project in Chongqing as an example, different urban areas and traffic design were introduced. The results of Grey relation analysis show that Chongqing has high comprehensive innovation value.

An International Competition of Architecture, Urban Development and Sustainable Housing, was held in Mexico in 2001. The aim of the contest was to create a vanguard and imaginative urban and architectural design that could accommodate the local regulation, the concept of sustainability and bioclimatic design. The proposed site is located within Guanajuato city’s periphery

From a critic review of the finalist projects we concluded that although they were very innovative in bioclimatic design they maintained the concept of prototype at the unit level and groups of prototypes layout in the plot at the urban level. We decided to take the same theme as an academic exercise for the following reasons:

• The opportunity to design under the same rules but changing the concept of a traditional mass housing complex to a slice of city that transforms itself in time with incremental dwellings.

• The city of Guanajuato is a colonial city very important for its history, cultural activity and architecture. The urban layout adapts to its rugged surface, which is very similar to the one of the given site.

• The contest program had a similar objective to that of the academic program of the last year of architecture in our University.

From the analysis of Guanajuato City thematic and non thematic elements of the urban tissue and with the aid of the Tissue Model method, students made the urban proposals. The unit proposals were designed with Open Building in mind instead of designing the required prototypes.

This article will focus on the tissue model methodology applied, first to formulate the tissue characteristics of downtown Guanajuato, then to develop the urban layout of the new housing complex and finally to develop the agreement documents for the urban design. Some examples of different final urban and support design will be given.

Learning from traditional miniature painting and from recent studies on their modern and creative applications, the purpose of this paper is to identify the key qualifications of miniature and possible ways for using miniature in urban design studios. Following discussions on the pedagogical and professional effects of using miniature in a design studio, the paper introduces De-Urban Design Studio’s philosophy and its experience in employing miniature as a way of representation as the case study.

Different from the urban design’s professional role which materialized in conventional architectural presentation, miniature appears as a representation way in the search for the appropriate media for the de-urban design’s activist model.

Expressing the philosophy of transition design and de-urbanization, and studying some of the miniatures produced in the De-Urban Design studio, this paper sheds light on the possibilities created by the usage of miniature in urban design studio as a communication medium in making the processes of design more inclusiveness, participatory and democratic.

The term miniatecture is used for the first time as a representation technique developed in the De-Urban Design Studio co-instructed by the authors of this paper.

Designers and planners in the UK are being asked by government to address sustainability. This paper seeks to explore how such issues can be addressed with the urban design process. From the literature, it is unclear when specific sustainability issues should be addressed, who actually makes decisions and what influences them, or how different stakeholders are engaged.

A case study is presented, focusing on the early stages of an urban design and redevelopment process taking place in a deprived region of the UK. Interviews with key decision‐makers and observations were conducted and subsequently analysed using content analysis.

The findings show that the process adopted by clients and consultants was relatively similar to that identified by the literature. The importance of creating a sustainable community, and of addressing deprivation and poor services was recognised from the outset. Sustainability was referred to in the briefing to select a team of consultants to develop a vision and regeneration framework. However, specific problems related to sustainability, such as crime and poor health, were not communicated through the briefing documents, for fear of deterring private investment. Indeed, the need to attract private investment was a key aspect of early stage of the urban design process.

This paper highlights potential difficulties of addressing sustainability at the early stage of the design process, when private sector backing is such a crucial component of the regeneration.

Urban agriculture is increasingly recognized for its potential contribution to more sustainable urban development. Urban agriculture includes the cultivation and raising, processing and marketing of food and non-food crops, medicinal and aromatic herbs, fruit trees, as well as animal products within urban and periurban areas. Urban agriculture positively impacts urban food security, local economic development, environmental management and community building. To reconcile the demands posed by urban growth with urban agriculture activities of high social and economic value, urban agriculture however should be included into land use planning and design, and regulated by municipalities, assuring its proper management and avoiding potential health and environmental risks. Open and green urban spaces could be designed for multifunctional urban agriculture and combine natural habitat, food production, educational, recreational and leisure activities. Such design processes would benefit from broad participation of urban planners and architects, urban farmers, citizens and slum inhabitants as to enhance ownership and engagement, more effectively use available local resources and give the process a higher credibility and wider outreach. This article shares the experience of Rosario, Argentina where the city planners and University staff collaborated with two low-income communities in the design and implementation of a multifunctional neighborhood park, public square and road reserve. A step-by-step participatory design process was followed: starting from initial visioning, defining and relating the various existing and multi-functional land uses desired, to elaborating the site plan, and agreeing on implementation procedures. The article briefly contextualizes the site and its inhabitants, illustrates the design process and the results achieved and highlights some of the problems encountered. Participatory design of open spaces for urban agriculture in Rosario- though a complex process- proved to have contributed to improving socio-economic and environmental conditions in the city, while also serving as a source of inspiration to other cities in the region.

Urban design has historically occupied the gap between architecture and planning. Although there have long been calls for the discipline to bridge this gap, urban design has continued to lean more heavily on design than planning. The efforts to revitalize downtown Toledo, a mid-western U.S. town experiencing steep economic decline, present a classic example of the potentially unfortunate results of this approach. Over the past three decades, there have been many attempts to revitalize the city, especially its downtown, by constructing several large public buildings, all within a few blocks of each other, all designed with little attention to each other or to the surrounding public spaces, and with a remarkable lack of civic engagement.

Responding to calls in the literature for inter-disciplinarity in urban design, and to the city's experience with urban design, the authors created a collaborative studio for architects and planners from two neighboring universities with two purposes: first, to establish a collaborative work environment where any design interventions would be firmly rooted in the planning context (i.e., to erase boundaries between architects and planners); second, to draw lessons from this experience for the practice and teaching of urban design.

Despite the difficulties of collaborating, architects and planners benefited from exposure to each other, learning about each other's work, as well as learning to collaborate. The interdisciplinary teams developed richer proposals than the architect-only teams. Finally, critical engagement with the community is essential to shaping downtown development.

Urban typogenetics investigates the use of machine intelligence for the evaluation of performance measures as a decision support system (DSS) with a focus on urban aesthetics evaluation. This framework allows designers to address performance measures, urban measures and aesthetic criteria in an adaptive, interactive generative design approach. The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the structure and the nature of the framework and the application of human-in-the-loop design systems to urban design.

Significant literature reviewed lead to the identification of an application potential in the decision-making process. This potential is situated around the use of AI for the evaluation of subjective performance criteria in a DSS. Recognising that the key decisions about urban aesthetics are based on the individual evaluation of the designer, an HITL approach for computational design software to support creative decisions is presented in this paper.

Urban typogenetics for interactive generative urban design allows the exploration of complex design spaces by using a human-in-the-loop design system in the context of urban aesthetics. Hybrid aesthetic evaluation allows the designer to analyse morphological features and urban aesthetics during exploratory search and reveal hidden aspects of the urban context by visualisation of the results of the aesthetic evaluation. Integrating performance measures and urban aesthetics in urban typogenetics addresses major criteria of urban design at the beginning of the creative process.

The use of a broad interactive approach to typogenetic design in an application to urban scenarios is a novel conceptual approach to the design of urban configurations. The suggested adaptive mechanism would allow the user of a typogenetic tool to subjectively evaluate solutions by sight and reason about aesthetic, social and cultural implication of the reviewed design solutions.