Towards a holistic approach of urban design.

Urban design is primarily and essentially three-dimensional design (Gosling and Maitland 1984), concerned with the shape, the surface and its physical arrangement of all kinds of urban elements; the basic components that make up the built environment at the level of buildings, spaces and human activities (Xia and Qing 2004). Gosling and Maitland (1984) state that the main objective of the urban designer is ‘to formulate and present the problem as accurately and vividly as possible’. Within the current design process and traditional methods of visualisation, (Xia and Qing 2004) state that current design methods only allow for a 2D representation of a space to be created. Architectural design practices will produce computerised renderings or 3D computer massing models to give a more accurate representation of the space. However there have been limited attempts at three dimensional computer representations which allow the user to get a greater sense of the urban space. Therefore, how to improve the quality of urban space and to express the design schema more effectively are problems that have been troubling urban designers for a long tim