What is the difference between urban planning and urban design?

Answer 1

While the two fields are interrelated, there is a simple distinction that can be made based on their respective outcomes when they are undertaken as processes:

• urban planning manages land use change over a medium/long-term (5-20 years or more) horizon through land use plans and policies over a large geography (neighbourhood, city, region);
• urban design creates places (placemaking) in the present/short-term time frame through illustrative drawings/visualizations of landscapes/buildings.

Logically, urban design is the implementation of planning; the land use permissions established in planning are realized through visualizations of the buildings and landscape features in urban design.

Practically, the processes associated with each field are converging to ensure the intent of land-use planning can be realized; planning policy is set in a reciprocal fashion with, and many times being led by urban design visualizations and guidelines.

A convergence of the two processes minimizes the need to revisit planning policy (usually requiring a lengthy and expensive public process) as a result of a desire to achieve a certain look and feel for a place (determined through the urban design process) that otherwise would not be permitted. Such a convergence requires surety of the details of the landscape/built form elements that will be achieved during the planning process. This can be problematic when a typical planning horizon is 20 years long and societal preferences for design aesthetics and function change on a quicker time frame. Accordingly, a desirable convergence of the two processes occurs at a neighbourhood or property scale of planning, where the gap between establishing land-use policy and implementation is minimized (in the short-term time frame: 5 years.)