Urban Design As Uneven Development

The political economy shapes how urban development is used in the production of designed space in our cities. The aesthetic quality created in these designed outcomes is unevenly and ultimately inequitably distributed over a city's space. Business interests strategically use how aesthetic value is structured by a social class system when they produce and market the built environment. Public intervention has been used to resolve these inequities, but these actions can reproduce uneven development that was never intended. Urban designers need to address these issues by reshaping how they can become more effective practitioners through critical reasoning.