Useful Links

Urban Design Alliance - UDAL

UDAL is a collaboration of leading organisations and professional bodies. It campaigns for and promotes awareness of how good urban design can make healthier, more sustainable, and safer towns and cities. The goal is a radical improvement in the quality of urban life.

The alliance is unique in its focus on collaboration between the built environment professions to make better places in which to live, work and relax.

UDAL’s organisations bring together over half a million people who design, plan, manage and campaign for better places. Their day-to-day decisions shape the urban environment. UDAL is working to help them become more effective.


WalkScore

Walk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighbourhood is good for your health and good for the environment.
Matt Lerner of Walkscore says: “Personally, I think the main benefit of Walk Score is that it makes walkability fun and engaging for people who haven't historically been interested in urban planning.  We've scored almost 2.5 million addresses and expect that to double this year. Our vision in the U.S. is that Walk Score becomes part of all real estate property listings so you would see a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom Walk Score 75.  We think that by providing consumers with this information we can increase the demand for more walkable housing.”  Walkscore is currently updating and improving data sources for the UK.


Urban Design Group

Founded in 1978, the Urban Design Group is a campaigning membership organisation. It believes that urban design is not the job of any single profession. Making successful places depends on breaking down professional barriers and building collaborations between the people with the power to make things happen.


Resource for Urban Design Information - RUDI

RUDI is the largest web resource dedicated to urban design and placemaking, offering an independent, unbiased information service to practitioners, academics, organisations and the public. It also offers a value-added membership service to industry professionals.


Royal Town Planning Institute(RTPI) – Urban Design Network (UDN)

The Urban Design Network (UDN) promotes the importance of urban design in spatial planning. The network provides a forum to put people with an interest in urban design in touch with one another, share advice, information and examples of good practice.


Home Zones

The Home Zone concept, called 'woonerf', was pioneered in the 1970s in the Netherlands’. Since then many countries have successfully transferred the core concepts and created their own safe areas.

Home Zones are an attempt to strike a balance between vehicular traffic and everyone else who uses the street - the pedestrians, cyclists, business people and residents.

Some see Home Zones as a way of "reclaiming" local streets from a traditional domination by cars. Others see it more modestly as a way of trying to restore the safety and peace in neighbourhoods that are becoming overwhelmed with speeding traffic.

Home Zones work through the physical alteration of streets and roads in an area. These alterations force motorists to drive with greater care and at lower speeds.