Balanced urban design process to create resilient and sustainable urban environments

Abstract

Today, urban design plays a key role in the creation of sustainable urban environments in terms of the “triple bottom line,” that encompasses the three dimensions of life–economics; social and environmental sustainability. Even though urban design has a wider scope for achieving sustainability on all its three fronts, the current process of urban design has often become an obstacle to attaining this scope. The current urban design process is top-down and there are serious criticisms of this process as it may not touch the “ground” level community requirements. Accordingly, in order to overcome the drawbacks of the current top-down process, researches have discussed implementing a community oriented bottom-up process. However, it is found that the bottom-up urban design process has its own negative features which can adversely affect the creation of sustainable urban designs. Accordingly, it is illustrated that neither the current top-down process nor the suggested bottom-up process will address the critical issues for achieving the current scope of urban design and, therefore, a “balanced” community embedded urban design process was required to overcome the current research gap. Accordingly, by adopting positive features of both top-down and bottom-up processes derived from literature, this chapter develops a new community embedded balanced urban design process framework.