Ambiguity In Urban Design

Introduction to make sense of a city when walking along any of its streets, thinking about the complexity of what we see before our eyes and wondering about that which lies behind the facades of the buildings and beyond the bend of the street. To read and interpret the tangle of overlapping and intertwined stories that this collection of people, objects and events offers. the change in urban scene, constant transformation of this landscape, or rather cityscape, around us, a mutation that we have come to associate with livelihood without movement and change. To understand urban design we will need to understand the urban space and the processes that produce it. there is a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty about the nature and scope of urban

this indicates why the search to find a satisfactory definition of urban design continous. it might be said that ambiguity offers a wider scope for innovation and development; once we have clearly defined a subject we have denied it some flexibility. what we need to remember is to separate complexity from ambiguity. definition: the interface between architecture, town planning, and related professions; the three dimensional design of places for people and their subsequent care and management. the design of the built-up area at a local scale, including the grouping f buildings for different use, the movement systems and services associated with them, and the spaces and urban landscape between them, and the creative activity by which the form and character of urban environment at the local scale may be devised. to arrive at a definition for urban design, we will need to take into account these identified elements which create confusion and ambiguity:

1- the scale of urban fabric which urban design

urban development process and urban form: the process lead to choose alternative to find out why a particular urban form is as it is and how it is likely to change, a methodology can be used in which development agencies, the structures they interact with, and the rationalities they use can be investigated. this would provide an analytical framework with which to approach the development process and its product, the urban fabric. this approach will be basically founded on four interrelated notions: the urban form has physical, psychological and social dimensions; that the study of urban form is best made possible by tracing the process of its development; that the development process, as a social process, will be best understood by addressing both individual actions and the structures which frame these actions; and that the understanding of this process will not be complete without addressing the social and physical contexts in which it takes place. on these bases, the development process can be analyzed by identifying its component parts, the way they interact, and the impact of this on the urban fabric and its form. it is argued that, in a development process, there are 'development agencies ' who operate through certain "development factors" within interrelated social and spatial "contexts"; and that any configuration of urban form is directly affected by variations of these components parts of the development process and their