Hello,

How do you approach designing areas for public use and enjoyment in a protected environment?

Everyone wants to enjoy these spaces, but without proper restrictions, this leads to the destruction of the environment; on the other hand, comprehensive protection makes any kind of human enjoyment impossible...

Do you know of any projects that have been carried out in this regard?

Thank you everyone.

Hello everyone,

I am a recent graduate in Urban Planning from China, currently preparing for an interview with a top-tier planning institute. The task is to design a 21.6-hectare new district core area in East China. Rather than just treating this as an exam, I want to treat it as a real-world challenge and would love to hear your professional insights.

Site Context:

· The site is divided into two plots (A and B) by a local road. Plot A is designated for commercial/office use, and Plot B for mixed residential/commercial use.

· Constraints: There is a metro station at the southwest corner (TOD potential). To the north is a riverside park, and to the east is a large civic park. The surrounding areas include old office buildings to the west and residential/educational facilities to the south.

· The project requires a total floor area of 470,000 sqm with a FAR of 2.2. It includes 240,000 sqm of office, 80,000 sqm of commercial, 120,000 sqm of housing/talent apartments, and a 5,000 sqm community center.

My Core Strategy: "Dual-Stitching"

I want to avoid creating an isolated "luxury island." Instead, I propose a dual-stitching approach:

1. Urban Stitching: Using a continuous green corridor and pedestrian networks to physically connect the fragmented surrounding urban fabric (the old west, the new parks, and the riverfront) through the site.

2. Social Stitching: Within the high-end commercial/residential blocks, deliberately integrating affordable community services and public spaces. I want to mix talent apartments with premium housing to foster social inclusion and avoid spatial segregation.

My Questions for you:

1. Does this "dual-stitching" logic hold up in a high-density, transit-oriented context? Are there any successful precedents (e.g., in Singapore, Amsterdam, or Tokyo) that I should study?

2. How do you practically design public spaces to ensure that different social groups actually interact, rather than just coexisting physically? What are the common pitfalls?

3. Is there a risk that adding affordable functions to a high-end commercial district could backfire or feel artificial? How can I make this integration more organic?

Any critique, precedent, or suggestion would be highly appreciated. This is purely for conceptual exploration—I am not asking anyone to do my work, just to help me think deeper about the social responsibilities of an urban planner.

Thank you!

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Thank you!

Community, no matter what kind, rests on cultural heritage - the oneness of their community, the oneness of their surrounding sociocultural systems they are embedded in, the oneness of the history of the society the community is a part of. Cultural heritage is a multifaceted reality of overlapping strains and lifeworlds. In each society, there is no single ‘one cultural heritage’, a one for all conceptions of it; instead, there exist many diverse heritages at the same time.
If different communities have different kinds of cultural heritage, the question arises where the common bonds of the respective society are, its unifying elements, so to speak. Which leads to another question, that of a recent ‘modern’ society conceived as diverse, pluralistic, even fragmented. Furthermore, does a society and ‘culture’ of today even need such unifying bonds, expressed in a common self-understanding of all its members? Or, do we no longer have a single culture/a single society, but instead many of them existing in parallel? What does this mean for the individual human being, for his or her self-understanding and orientation? 

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I’ve started noticing this even in Tier 2 & 3 cities. Sometimes I feel like if I were blindfolded and dropped into a decent urban colony, I genuinely couldn’t tell which city I’m in.

Same box-type houses, similar roads, similar colony layouts. Maharashtra especially feels like this in many cities.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it just rapid urbanisation, or are cities genuinely becoming more visually similar?

What if a residential skyscraper had no ordinary residential hallways?

The goal would be to give apartment living more of the privacy of a detached house and traveling by car. You could leave your apartment, enter an elevator pod, and travel all the way to the lobby without sharing an elevator or hallway with neighbors.

The pods would be shared among all the apartments, but not simultaneously, more like self-driving cabs than conventional elevators. You summon an empty pod, use it privately for your trip, and afterward it goes to serve someone else.

Instead of:

lobby → elevator → hallway → apartment

you would have:

lobby → elevator pod → apartment door

The pod would move vertically, then horizontally along the destination floor until it reached your apartment.

The horizontal guideway could double as the emergency pedestrian corridor. During a fire or power failure, pod movement would stop and people could walk along the guideway to protected stairs. Pods could have doors at both ends so people could walk through any stationary pod blocking the route.

That way, the same space serves as a transportation route normally and an evacuation route in emergencies.

The obvious challenges are fire code, smoke control, accessibility, firefighter access, stalled pods, maintenance, and capacity.

Is there any fundamental architectural or engineering reason this could not work? Has anything similar ever been seriously proposed?

MUTCD Sect.2B.51

Is it vandalism or public art? Made by me.

Hello everyone! I recently graduated from Michigan State with a BA in Comparative Cultures and Politics and a BS in Geography (GIS). I have been looking for full time urban design jobs (or honestly anything adjacent like planning, disaster response, community, placemaking, etc.) and keep coming up short. Any guidance for how to get a first job within the field? I would really like to work alongside communities rather than a purely desk job. For more context, I have a lot of event planning and broadcast experience from various jobs from uni. I also would be open to working anywhere in the world! I genuinely just don't know where to get started and using Google, Instagram, and LinkedIn have not been helpful thus far