Urbanism is the practice of shaping how towns and cities function and evolve.
It’s what weaves the fabric of life in a metropolis. It is what determines how, and if at all, neighbors meet for coffee in a small burg.
Urbanism creates the physical realm in the places where people live and come together—the interconnected systems of land use, buildings, parks, and mobility. And in doing so it establishes places’ social, cultural, and economic dimensions.
Urbanism creates the possibility of making communities work better, from a safer crosswalk to more frequent transit service to a neighborhood battery power backup to cleaner air for a whole valley.
Tools and methods
These are some of the things urbanism can do:
- Determine how land is used—the quantity, form, and compactness of housing, the proximity of services, walkability, and good transit to that housing, and the extent and quality of parks
- Establish building standards, including what they are used for, their makeup, and how tall they can be
- Provide infrastructure, services, and investments for transportation, which includes allocating resources between transportation modes and managing transportation demand
- Create opportunities and constraints for people to benefit from electrification in all its forms, thereby enabling—or hindering—the transition to widespread electrification
- Protect and strengthen natural lands and tree canopy, local food systems, biodiversity while specifying the creative use of natural infrastructure in transportation and the built environment
- Develop an architecture for the community’s water and waste, in particular, by determining where a community gets its water and what it does with its waste
- Shape the community’s exposure to environmental shocks and stressors such as wildfires, floods, and heat
- Manage air quality through coordinated actions in transportation, buildings, construction, industry, ports, and waste
- Educate and coordinate large numbers of people living near one another to use their shared resources effectively and build self-reliance
In sum, urbanism powerfully shapes air quality, safety and health, access, affordability, contact with nature, social cohesion, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate resilience.
It sets the stage, maybe more than anything else, for our way of life now and in the future.
And perhaps most important of all, what urbanism does is up to us. Through policy and management, urbanism practice can and should improve.
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