Urban Design

Urban design is a field of architecture and urban planning that operates at an intermediate scale, between architectural design and urban planning, enabling proposals to be developed from methods of understanding space that facilitate harmony between the built environment and human interactions. We believe that through this, we can build spaces that reduce the problems arising from urbanization, such as pollution, traffic congestion, ecological impacts, or urban voids.

Although many believe that urban planning is only concerned with the physical and aesthetic aspects of cities, it requires forecasting, trend analysis, political maneuvering, and social knowledge. The goal is always to improve the collective quality of life through environmental, social, educational, and other actions.
At LDA, we use urban design as a process to design and shape the physical characteristics of cities, towns, or villages, where we deal with the larger scale of groups of buildings, streets, public spaces, neighborhoods, and even districts, with the aim of making urban areas functional, attractive, and sustainable.

Urban design deals with the relationship between humans and the environment, dealing with the scale of daily life, with the lived space of daily negotiation, working with space as a support for uses and activities developed according to the praxis of a community, considering issues related to culture and identity of that population.

We look at the importance of cultural issues for the acceptance and appropriation of public space design proposals by users. Therefore, strengthening the relationship of the built space with local culture makes users take better care of public spaces, considering them as part of their belongings and not as a place of no one.
As urban design is directly linked to urban planning, we apply our design thinking and metadesign methodology to identify the relationship that buildings will have with the open space of the city, how users will behave, and which demands we must meet, facilitating the entire implementation process. This methodology allows us to identify the local economic activities, social use, relationship with the natural environment, among other important characteristics.

In addition to defining the layout of streets, neighborhoods, road networks, soil and environmental issues, urban design helps to organize all elements and offers safety, practicality, and well-being to the inhabitants of the area.

Urban design can also be used as an instrument to minimize negative impacts on the physical, cultural, and natural environment, identifying how new elements should be included in the determined urban space without threatening its integrity.
In recent years, with population growth and the advancement of technological solutions, large cities have been changing their urban design with the goal of organizing traffic or facilitating urban mobility. We believe that the planned cities of the world are decisive for our future, which is why thinking about city planning is an increasingly urgent issue.

Urban design includes all our projects or can be a larger discipline when our clients or their investors request us for real estate developments on city, neighborhood, or even block scales, while also dealing with existing infrastructure and climate change, always being resilient and sustainable. We also prioritize equality, safety, and human well-being, balancing flows and accesses and enhancing permeability between areas. Understanding the city is a dynamic of public scale that for us requires us to be able to create connections and dynamics of more complex activities than a building program. It is life at the scale of movement, with the human being as the main point in this process.