About Us

The Urban Design Review is intended to be an accessible platform for urban designers and related disciplines to publish, share and promote their thinking and achievements and communicate the value of urban design. We can inspire others by example of what can be achieved in different contexts and at different scales.

It should be a valuable resource for decision makers: Politicians, developers, government organisations and others can tap into this knowledge. They can seek help and advice from the creative and experienced designers published in the Urban Design Review.

After a lifetime of policy and practical work in architecture, city and regional planning and urban design, I believe urban design has a vital role in creating more ideal environments for people to thrive in.

Urban design can provide an alternative way to the destruction of the landscape, ecology and heritage. It can obviate the sameness, ugliness, inhuman scale and discomfort of the built environment that should not be allowed to happen.

We must constantly strive through urban design endeavour to protect what is valuable, transform existing environments for the better and create new environments fit to live in and that uplift the human spirit.

The mission is to make urban design a fundamental part of planning, designing, building and managing settlements, towns, cities and whole regions where ever they may be.

Raeburn Chapman, Editor