Regional design: Recovering a great landscape architecture and urban planning tradition

We are witnessing a rebirth of physical design, both in practice and the academy, spurred on by neo-traditional community planning and neo-urbanism. This article attributes the sources of contemporary regional design to this renaissance. It also traces its origins to classic regional planning, which has been a professional activity for over a century. Regional design shapes the physical form of regions. It takes a regional perspective in guiding the arrangement of human settlements in communities. It is a strategy to accommodate growth by providing a physical framework to determine or guide the most beneficial location, function, scale, and inter-relationships of communities within a region. This strategic function of regional design distinguishes it from urban and regional planning, apart from its focus on physical form. Communities, the links among them, and their environs are the three key physical components of regions that are the objects of regional design. Regional design strives to connect these communities by transport, communication, and other links into regional networks. Keeping the fringes or environs of the communities relatively sparsely settled is another aim. The article presents historic and contemporary examples of regional design in the US and Europe, and outlines principles for regional design.