Urban Design Ecologies

The discipline of urban design is undergoing a rapid expansion and realignment. It is experiencing a shift from a profession dominated by architects and planners, directed at urban development, to a more expansive set of practices engaging new forms of social and environmental ecologies, as cities worldwide adapt to economic restructuring, mass migrations and climate change. Bringing together classic and new texts from the last 40 years, this AD Reader focuses attention on the critical tools needed to understand how cities have been designed and constructed and then changed over time. This enables new ways of envisioning how cities must be conceived and adapted in the future to the dual conditions of rapid urbanisation and economic restructuring, coupled with unpredictable environmental conditions due to climate change.