Abstract:Developing more sustainable communities is among our foremost challenges, and urban designers have a leading role to play. I view this role very broadly, not just in terms of designing public spaces, neighbourhoods, streets and sites, but as writers such as Shuman (1998), McDonough and Braungart (2002), Hester (2006), Beatley (2011) and Lovins et al. (2014) have argued also through designing new energy systems, industrial ecologies, community participation processes, more locally oriented and equitable economies and biophilic cities. In this view physical design overlaps substantially with system design, process design, policy, ecology, and even engineering and economics.