Almost fifty years after the rise of the disciplines of Landscape Architecture and then Urban planning in the Anglo -American tradition, Urban Design emerged as an academic discipline in 1960 focussing on the idea of appreciation and enjoyment of satisfactory “Perceived” and “Lived” experiences[1] of inhabiting the physical City, beyond its ‘Conceived’ rationalised comprehension, through modern Architecture and Planning. The study of Urban Design had a quiet beginning in India incubated within the faculties of architecture at the SPA Delhi and the CEPT Ahmedabad in two different ways. In the last six decades, the academic curriculum, research and field of practice of Urban Design as distinct from planning have evolved and expanded powered by architecture. In the times of conflict between rapid urbanisation and the natural environment, while illustrating some current projects with the application of the idea of Urban Design, it would be of interest to reiterate how Urban Design has since its inception frequently been an architecture-based creative practice responding to human urban aspirations and also a creative resistance to urban human problems caused by so-called urban development while upholding the values of urban life and propagating it through various means. Behind such practice, there is a discipline that can be perceived empirically and historically, more easily, than can be rationally conceptualised.
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