Urban design seems to have found widespread popularity, cropping up in professional journals, government websites, academic debates and popular media. We may ask ourselves - how can we make sense of this growing attention to the subject matter; how can we account for the rising significance of urban design? An answer may lie in the perceived failure of post-war urban renewal schemes, after which architects and planners lost interest in imagining the future shape of the urban environment, leaving a professional gap that needed to be filled. While this account is partly true, it does not fully explain the significance of such imagining. Areas of professional activity are constantly changing and some lose their usefulness and become obsolete. Why is there such a need for imagining the future of urban environment? To answer this question we need to locate urban design within the context of the urban development process and see what roles it plays, what gaps it fills and what meanings it carries. A quick glance at the necessary urban design skills identified by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) may help us to find some clues. It enlists the areas of master planning, housing market renewal and growth, infill and mixed-use development in urban centres, as well as considerations for liveability in cities. Together, they amount to a wide range of skills necessary to manage the development and change of urban environment. After an initial period in which urban design was narrowly defined as merely dealing with appearances, there is now a growing appreciation that it also, and more importantly, deals with the organisation of urban space and the processes of shaping cities. As urban development is a central part of the process of urban change, we may start to see the potentially strategic place that urban design occupies in shaping the city of the future. Cities have always been shaped by the most powerful forces of the time. Two centuries ago, the rise of industrial society dramatically changed the configuration of cities, turning them into workshops of the world. Today, it is the service society's turn to shape the city in its own image, to turn it into a locus of exchange; for ideas, goods and services to be traded via the abstract medium of money, in face-to-face or mediated marketplaces, which are supported and interconnected by new technologies. In its broadest sense, urban design contributes to the task of adjusting the city to this structural change by producing a new spatial organisation and projecting a new image that befit a new society. One of the characteristics of this structural change in society has been turbulence in institutional roles and relationships. A new relationship emerged between the state and the market: the withdrawal of the state from a range of activities creating a vacuum to be filled by a multiplication of private and third-sector agencies. This posed a host of problems, including the questions of how to operate in a market where rules of the game were changing fast or disappearing, how to deliver common goods, how to support those parts of society that cannot make the transition safely, and how to maintain the state's legitimacy after reduction in some of its areas of involvement. This was a search for a new division of labour, to find out where to draw the line between the public and the private, a perennial problem that now needed new thinking. Like any other structural transformation of a system, it had caused a crisis that needed the adoption of new measures; it was a fragmented context that needed repair. A range of responses emerged, among which urban design dealt with urban development. In urban development these problems of transition from one paradigm to another became partly manifest in intensified cycles of boom and bust, deepened socio-spatial segregation, and privatisation or decline of the public realm. The public realm represented the common ground which seemed either to be abandoned by all agencies or under threat from the encroachment of private interests. …