Urban design & placemaking
Urban design and placemaking is the work of shaping the parts of a town that everyone uses: the street, the square, the edge between a building and the pavement, the route between one place and the next. It is design at the scale where a place is either legible and worth walking, or it is not.
The practice approaches it as spatial restructuring rather than decoration. A street that does not work is rarely fixed by furniture; it is fixed by changing how movement, parking, frontage, planting and pedestrian space are apportioned, and by being specific about what the place is for.
Problems this addresses
- A historic main street with strong heritage assets but an underperforming public environment
- A civic square that is technically public but is used as parking
- Fragmented pedestrian environments where walking between two nearby places is unpleasant or unsafe
- Town centres losing commercial activity to newer autocentric development on the edge
- Development pressure in a heritage context, where conservation and renewal are being treated as opposites
Who this is for
- Municipalities and public-realm clients
- Business improvement districts and town centre partnerships
- Developers working in established or heritage contexts
- Architects needing the spatial framework around a building
- Hospitality and destination projects where arrival and setting matter
What 34 Degrees Design contributes
Urban design frameworks, streetscape proposals, traffic-calming and movement restructuring, civic space upgrades, and the visualisations and spatial diagrams that let a council, a landowner or a business association see what is being proposed and agree to it.
Project evidence
- Federal Campus Development Frameworks
United States
A long-range institutional planning and urban development framework for a large-scale federal campus, integrating land use, movement, infrastructure, landscape and public realm within a highly complex operational environment.
- Linking the Lake: Downtown Rail-Cap Thesis
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
A transit-oriented urban design framework for reconnecting downtown Toronto with its waterfront across the Gardiner Expressway, Lake Shore Boulevard and the CN rail corridor.
- Breede Valley Revitalisation Initiatives
Worcester & Rawsonville, Western Cape, South Africa
A series of town centre revitalisation and public-realm initiatives in Worcester and Rawsonville — strengthening historic main streets, civic space, pedestrian environments and local economic activity.
- Berg River Corridor Framework
Paarl, Western Cape, South Africa
An unsolicited urban design proposal reimagining Paarl’s Berg River corridor as a civic, ecological and connective spine — addressing a spatial divide the river currently reinforces.
- Casco Viejo Urban Analysis
Ciudad de Panamá, Panama
An urban and heritage analysis framework for the historic districts of Casco Viejo, Santa Ana and El Chorrillo, supporting heritage-led revitalisation in Panama City’s UNESCO-listed urban core.
- Historic Core (CBD) Revitalisation
Georgetown, Kentucky, United States
An award-winning downtown revitalisation framework for Georgetown’s historic core, repositioning Royal Spring Park and the North Water Street corridor as the civic and ecological anchor of a walkable small city.