Urban Design Vs Urban Planning

3.6. Urban acupuncture

Urban planning began as a movement primarily interested in the challenges, which belong to urban design. Urban design and urban planning are different because urban design focuses more on the proactive design of urban spaces, while urban planning refers to the urban development management, including planning and programmes, and other forms of control. Urban design is derived from several scientific disciplines such as urban planning, architectural design, development economics, politics, transportation, urban engineering and urban landscape, but exceeds them. Urban design blends these and other directions along the urban vision of the city and the use of resources and skills that are necessary to develop a vision of

It happens because the human being is constantly aware of his position in the environment. There is a reaction to being squeezed in as in a tunnel and another to the freedom of the square. Thus the city becomes one's experience “through pressures and vacuums, a sequence of exposures and enclosures, of constraint and relief."(Cullen, 2007). The manner of the environment creation is potentially one of the most exciting and the most prevailent sources of pleasure or frustration in the city everyday life." Until such happy day arrives when people in the street throw their caps in the air at the sight of a planner as they now do for footballers and pop stars, it will take a lot, because it is difficult to fight for the general principle, easier to protect particular. The ecologist can fight for his national parks, local authorities for its green belts, antiquarians for conservation areas and so on, the planner for all those. Additionally, change, of itself, is often resented even if it can be seen to be a change for the better. Continuity is a desirable characteristic of cities. Consequently, while planning consent in a development stream might be automatic, one may have to expect a built-in delay of ten or even twenty years in an important conservation area because everything is done in accordance with the planning. However, in order to revive the city, visible and rapid changes are required so the energy of change could

This process observes cities as living and breathing organisms and pinpoints areas in need of repair. Sustainable projects, then, revitalize the whole by healing its constituents. Technology, networks, collective knowledge and intelligence are used to select the urban nodes, which should be treated first since they have the greatest potential to regenerate (http://helsinkiacupuncture.blogspot.com). Finnish architect and social theorist of Italian origin, Marco Casagrande, eschewed school knowledge of massive urban renewal projects, in favour of small local projects that have a bottom-up approach, starting from the needs and ideas of the community (http://kylemillermsis.wordpress.com). In an era of constrained budgets and limited resources, this is an effective, cheap and very practical theory (and already the practice now), especially if it is well known that a large part of the Brazilian city of Curitiba (considered to be the most creative city in the world) was renewed thanks to the use of urban acupuncture by the mayor Jaime Lerner and his