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Urban design has been defined as "the conceptualization of the built environment, in response to human needs and desires" (The Lexicon of the New Urbanism, version 3.2).
It is increasingly recognized that community design and physical planning — the ways in which buildings, streets, activities and open space are physically organized and made to relate to each other and to the surrounding landscape — matter considerably, for both functional as well as aesthetic reasons.
From a functional perspective, community design can be a powerful influence on human behavior — it can promote or deter human interaction, inspire a sense of security or provoke apprehension, provide or deny access, indicate acceptance or rejection. It can improve efficiencies in infrastructure and service provisions; and it strongly conditions transportation choices — an appropriately supportive physical environment will encourage walking, bicycling and the use of public transit, whereas a barren environment will discourage these modes of transportation and increase auto-dependence.
For example, it is not indifferent, in terms of human behavior, whether a parking lot is in the front of a building, or in the back. This choice will have a variety of functional implications for the potential users of the streetscape it creates. For example, parking in the front favors motorists, while inhibiting the approach of pedestrians, bicycles and transit users. Parking in the back accommodates motorists but favors pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users. Parking in the front will increase the distance between the building and other nearby buildings across the street, and therefore reduce the proximity between, say, lunchtime workers and nearby delis. Parking in the back will reduce the distance between a worker and his or her lunch, and therefore increase the likelihood it will be procured in the nearby deli rather than delivered or brought from home. These are functional relationships, which are increasingly studied, understood, quantified and modeled in the academic and professional literature.
In New Jersey, the question of whether the parking is in the front or in the back of the building, and whether the building faces the street, or the parking lot, have typically been perceived as site planning issues. The question of whether the building is single-story or multi-story, whether it has retail and restaurants on the ground floor or is strictly office, and how much parking it is required to provide on-site have typically been perceived as zoning issues. And the question of whether the building sits in a human-scale block, defined by human-scale streets, or in a super-block facing a highway has typically been addressed through the subdivision controls.
In fact, all three of these aspects fall under the definition of community design, which provides a unifying framework that bridges and links subdivision, site planning and zoning. No one would dispute the authority of a municipality in New Jersey to regulate subdivision, site planning and zoning. However, few would feel comfortable with a regulatory framework that explicitly links these three well established but heretofore largely independent set of controls — which is precisely what community design seeks to achieve.
In addition, community design also seeks to unify other important aspects of the built environment, regulated under other sections of the local code — the design of streets and intersections, controlled by the engineering standards; the location and type of street trees and other plantings, regulated by the landscape standards; and the methods for addressing stormwater, regulated in the stormwater standards.
Unfortunately, these many types of regulations are often poorly coordinated and even at odds with each other, and this presents a great challenge for improved community design.
Of course, in addition to its functional role, design also has aesthetic implications. In that capacity it influences the appreciation we have for some places, and the indifference we reserve for others. We can appreciate the aesthetics of a public plaza or green, along with the functional benefits of light and air it provides us; we can appreciate the visual experience of a well-designed boulevard, along with the mobility it offers. Aesthetic and functional considerations are often intertwined and difficult to separate. And to the extent that our appreciation or indifference for a place is translated into quality of life assessments and investment decisions made by residents and employers, then aesthetics also has functional and financial consequences. How could it not be so? We know people care about their surroundings and, given the opportunity, people are discriminating about quality. A well-designed environment is much more than the sum of its parts — it represents an asset to the community, it inspires and educates, and it creates real estate value. Aesthetics obviously contribute to this.