Warwick Doddrell is a graduate urban designer in our Urban Futures team in Sydney. Since joining Architectus, he has worked on major precinct master plans and strategic visions for transport, infrastructure projects and new communities.
In this article, Warwick shares his top tips for urban design students. These are resources that inspire, save time on university projects and help you get a head start in the profession.
Read the classics
Nerd out on deeply fascinating but incredibly esoteric history, planning, and architectural books about how humans experience built form. These are some of the books that opened my eyes, taught me to read a city and its story and explain a deeply felt but hard to articulate problem with modern spaces.
The Death & Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs’ immortal words articulated what I was feeling about contemporary built form. Why were all my favourite places overseas, in older villages and towns, and not the places we build in Australia? This book introduces core concepts like “eyes on the street” and “passive surveillance.” Jacobs helped me understand the psychology of why I love a high street more than a shopping centre.
Suburban Nation
by Jeff Speck, Andres Duany and
Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck
This book opened my eyes to the systems and incremental changes that have led us here, from behaviour to planning and financial policy. Despite decades of good intentions, our current planning system isn’t serving our communities. The book sketches out the approaches to planning that we can change. I also highly recommend Jeff Speck’s other practical book, Walkable City.
Happy City
by Charles Montgomery
This is a fantastic introduction to the intersection between the science of happiness and urban design. Charles Montgomery explores real-world examples of grass roots change makers around the world, experimental, innovative and positive approaches to change in our communities. It’s positive, delightful, and inspiring.
Tip: Add these to your birthday present wish list, as some of them are a bit pricey and hard to find. Nevertheless, these books are investments in your own education and you’ll return to them time and again.
Learn the tools
Graphic tools like Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop are a given, but don’t underestimate the value of learning GIS, SketchUp and even Excel. That way you can source your own data and research, and perform your own solar and yield testing, to make informed decisions by real world information and feasibility.
Become passionate about storytelling. Urban Design is not just about research and understanding a place, it’s about communication. Whether that’s research and analysis, findings or a new vision, you’ve got to tell a story about the place that people can understand visually.
Most importantly, learn to draw with your hands. Nothing beats being able to quickly put pen to paper to express an idea or explore possibilities. You’ll become more confident, and more agile in your work.
Build up a stock of assets and resources
Find the right tools and resources for a project is often time consuming. Cadmapper is a great place to start for low cost (often free) 3D models and vector files of sites. This will save you so much time, and let you get on with storytelling.
Here are some of my favourite sites for visualisation resources:
Icons: Noun Project
Textures: Architextures
Tree assets: LandSpace Architecture
Cad blocks: Toffu
Site Plan Tutorials: Show it better
Tutorials and resources: Arch-vizz
Tip: use images of people and trees to create your own brushes in Photoshop, then you can quickly paint trees and people into your images and bring them to life in no time.
Re-imagine networking
I know it feels awkward, but networking shouldn’t be a dirty word!
Like all industries, it’s important to get out there, meet people and create opportunities for yourself.
What helped me was finding genuine opportunities to create connections. Don’t make it about trying to get a job, but instead about learning. Ask a mentor about their career journey. Maybe they worked on a project you love, and you can learn more about how it was created.
If you find something genuine you want to learn or ask about, you’ll be more natural, more curious and hopefully make more meaningful connections.
