Urban Design Studio Overview

Los Angeles’ Urban Design Studio works to elevate the quality of public and private design in order to create a more vibrant, livable, walkable, and sustainable City.

The Studio’s guiding values and themes include creating lively streets and public spaces that contribute to healthy communities and reflect Los Angeles’s diverse population and architectural legacy, elevating design expectations for private development, and promoting Los Angeles as a center of design innovation and experimentation.

The Studio has a unique role within the City, working at the intersection of design review of private development projects and coordinating between city departments to activate streets and public places. Through policy initiatives, the Studio is involved in efforts to upgrade codes and ordinances to foster design innovation, while at the same time setting a high benchmark for quality design across the City, consistent with the Citywide Design Guidelines.

The Studio is spearheading several neighborhood-level and citywide design initiatives that reflect these guiding values and themes. Read more about our current programs.

Pedestrian-First Design focuses on design strategies that create human-scale spaces in response to how people actually engage with their surroundings, by prioritizing active street frontages, clear paths of pedestrian travel, legible wayfinding, and enhanced connectivity.

 

360 Degree Design focuses on design techniques that equally consider all sides of a building’s use of materials, massing, articulation, and scale and that recognize and respect a project’s surrounding context.

 

Climate-Adapted Design responds to Los Angeles’ exceptional Mediterranean climate as well as rapidly changing climatic conditions, by reducing the need for imported water, supporting the local habitat and watershed, and limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Contact Information

For general inquiries, email planning.urbandesign@lacity.org

 

Programs and Initiatives
 

The Urban Design Studio spearheads neighborhood-level and citywide design initiatives. Click on the link below to read more about our programs aimed at improving the design of public spaces.