The role of the architect in the formulation of urban design

Urban design can be defined simply as “shaping spaces for people”, in other words, “the embodiment of physical and social environment, consciously or intuitively”. This article aims to read and discuss the active role of the architect in shaping the cities through different geographic and political applications and how this role is affected by the political, social and temporal conditions of the cities. Cities emerge “as a result of the decisions chain.” Even though modern cities are mostly created intuitively, this intuitiveness is not coincidental, the decisions made play a role in this formation. In order to understand the role of the architect in this formulation and its relations with other active roles, three different specific examples are examined and discussed as three different scenarios. As we can read through these examples, the architect has taken part in different activities in urban planning in different periods of time, and political authority and sociological conditions affected the architect’s position. In certain periods, the architect took place between the investor and the municipality as in the case of New York City, in some periods had the opportunity to shape the urban environment individually and sometimes as it is in the socialist periods, shaped the cities by relatively becoming a part of the political authority.