Joint Centre for Urban Design (JCUD)

An interdisciplinary centre promoting better design of public spaces and reaching out to the wider community.

The Joint Centre for Urban Design was set up in 1972, to promote better design of (and in) the urban public realm: the public spaces where we all have the right to be, but which so often seem not to offer us all they might.

Since the inception of our courses, we at the Joint Centre have felt that the traditional professional disciplines largely fail to address the issues involved in designing the public realm. Effectively, these issues fall through a gap between the lines of demarcation which separate architecture, town planning, landscape architecture, estate management, traffic engineering and the host of others implicated in the production of the public realm.

By its nature, then, Urban Design is an interdisciplinary activity. Education at the Joint Centre reflects this by attracting students from many different backgrounds, and by embodying an integrative philosophy, bringing together theory and practice from many different fields and embodied in the Joint Centre's management structure.

The focus of our integrative approach is ultimately a practical one: we seek to equip students to intervene effectively in the production of an improved public realm, through a practice which is relevant to many existing disciplines. This practice, however, must be critical of many current ways of doing things: it must be reflective practice, integrated with critical theory. The concept of the 'reflective practitioner' is therefore central to the Joint Centre's philosophy.

Urban design courses:

Urban Design (MA / PGDip / PGCert)

Urban Design (MRes)

Urban Design PhD studies

Research and consultancy

• Rootscape – developing the urban design skills of young people (UrbanBuzz)
• Urban Design Study for Lesney Matchbox Factory Site (LB Hackney)
• Designing Sustainable Cities (Urban Practitioners and CABE)
• Social housing (J A Pye Oxford Ltd.)
• Evidence review: Thames Gateway (DCLG)
• Townscape appraisal (Heritage Lottery Fund)
• Transferable lessons from the new towns (DCLG)

Recent research publications

Butina Watson, G. and Bentley, I. (2007) Identity by Design. Architectural Press.

Butina Watson, G and Zetter, R. (2006) Designing Sustainable Cities in the Developing World. Ashgate.

Butina Watson, G., Brownill, S., Carpenter, J.,Durning, B. and Reeve, A. (2006) Thames Gateway Evidence Review - Executive Summary. London, Department for Communities and Local Government.

Cooper J, Oskrochi R, (2008), Fractal analysis of street vistas – a potential tool for assessing levels of visual variety in everyday street scenes Environment and Planning B 35 (2).

Reeve, A., Goodey, B. and Shipley, R. (2007) Townscape evaluation methods. Urban Morphology,11(1). pp 25-41.