Hi, I'm Emily Talen, and I want to welcome you to Urban Design Essentials
Urban design is typically taught at America's
universities in a two to three year program in a school of
architecture or planning, but I think it can be a lot more
accessible. There's a lot we can learn about urban design
and even the how tos and the practice of urban design without
enrolling in a two to three year program at a University
And one of the reasons I think this is true is that the tools
used to communicate urban design things like Google Earth
and SketchUp and GIS and image manipulation are free are
easy to learn and are really a game changer
With our knowledge about planning principles and design of
place in hand, these communication tools fundamentally change
who can claim the role of urban designer
This series is geared specifically to urban planners and
those with an existing policy and basic theoretical knowledge
of how cities run and how they're regulated
But there really are no prerequisites
You don't need any special degree, such as a degree in architecture
to do these exercises and to learn the practice of urban
design. With these analytical and graphical tools, you will
be able to perform and create urban design proposals that
will be relevant and implementable in your own community
The series offers a step-by-step video based instruction on
some of the most important topics in urban design
Most importantly, the course will show you even if you have
no background in urban design, how to get started .My goal
is to show you how to translate ideas about the future direction
of cities and about the future development of urban places
in design terms not in terms of tables and land use maps
which are important in their own right, but also in terms
of physical intervention
The course is focused on the how to of urban design, how to
create urban design plans and models and graphics using GIS
SketchUp and graphics editing software
Again, all of the software used in this course is shareware.
It's open to the public
It's free, so the course stresses the technical how to side
of urban design skills are demonstrated by applying substantive
normative urban design goals, goals such as neighborhood
delineation, centrality mixing uses, calming traffic, etc.
Etc.
Urban design is fundamentally about the design of cities
So let's get started
So in this first course, we're going to focus on the software
tools. As I've mentioned in the introduction, this course
takes you through step by step instruction in GIS SketchUp
and two graphic design packages later on in the course, I'm
also going to introduce you to a desktop publishing tool
called Scribus
No software purchase is required
This course uses only free, open source software
You're going to learn how to create analytical maps using
two GIS, how to create 3D SketchUp models, and how to create
2D graphical design
In this introductory group of videos, I'm going to demonstrate
some basics about the main software tools we'll be using
which are GIMP, which is a rastor based graphic design tool,
Inkscape, which is a vector based graphic design tool, and
QGIS, which is an open source GIS software and a main competitor
to ArcGIS. The beauty again is that this software is free
and downloadable, so let's dive right in