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

We are witnessing a rebirth of physical design, both in practice and the ac ademy, spurred on by neo-traditional community planning and neo-urbanism. T his 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 shape s the physical form of regions. It takes a regional perspective in guiding the arrangement of human settlements in communities. It is a strategy to ac commodate growth by providing a physical framework to determine or guide th e most beneficial location, function, scale, and inter-relationships of com munities within a region. This strategic function of regional design distin guishes it from urban and regional planning, apart from its focus on physic al form. Communities, the links among them, and their environs are the thre e key physical components of regions that are the objects of regional desig n. Regional design strives to connect these communities by transport, commu nication, and other links into regional networks. Keeping the fringes or en virons of the communities relatively sparsely settled is another aim. The a rticle presents historic and contemporary examples of regional design in th e US and Europe, and outlines principles for regional design. (C) 2000 Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.