The Urban Challenge — Urban Design Learning
The Urban Challenge brings together ideas for better cities, from adaptable buildings and local living to transport and the wider urban landscape. Urban Good provided editing and publication design for Urban Design Learning’s guide to the multi-timed city, published in January 2023 and available as a free PDF with a limited print run.
Editing and publication design for a shared vision of better cities.
The Urban Challenge brings together ideas from a series of ten events exploring how cities could respond to the changes brought by Covid-19. Published by Urban Design Learning in January 2023, with support from Footwork, the guide draws on a programme involving more than 500 attendees and 120 contributors, which tested 30 ideas for urban change.
The discussions connected four themes: buildings, local living, city structures and connectivity. Together, they formed the basis of the “multi-timed city”: a way of thinking about how places support daily life at different scales, from the space outside our front doors to the neighbourhoods, town centres and cultural destinations further afield.
Urban Good’s contribution
Urban Good provided design and editing for the publication, helping turn a wide-ranging conversation into a concise guide for people who plan, design, build and manage places.
Our brief was to draw together material from the events and shared Miro board, explain how ideas had been tested, and connect the findings to a clear case for changing how cities are planned and managed. This gave the editorial work a dual purpose: recording the collective thinking and making its implications for the future of cities easier to understand.
The publication follows the journey from individual ideas to a shared framework. Colour-coded themes, diagrams and tables help readers trace the connections between buildings, neighbourhoods and transport. Bold typographic spreads give the central messages room, while pages of ideas retain the feel of the collaborative discussions that shaped the work.
It is the kind of work we enjoy: making complex ideas easier to understand, and using design to help people see how their work connects to a bigger picture.
From the doorstep to the wider city
The guide looks beyond the 15-minute neighbourhood to consider what people need within one, five, 15, 30 and 60 minutes of home. Its central argument is that these scales depend on one another: adaptable buildings, lively local centres and better connections need to be planned together.
The aim is to reduce the distance people need to travel while keeping access to the activities, services and opportunities that make city life worthwhile. The publication gives that collective thinking a clear structure to read, share and discuss.
Download the publication
The Urban Challenge is available as a free PDF from Urban Design Learning. Visit UDL to read and download the publication.