The intentional shaping of cities to serve the sacred, defensive, political, and economic goals of societies is as old as the city itself. However, the roots of contemporary urban design are relatively recent and may be traced to the Industrial Revolution when people sought ways to deal with the unhealthful and chaotic living conditions of the industrial city. Thinking followed three main directions: utopian visions for ideal communities, development of minimum standards for housing and sanitation, and examination of ways of making the city more efficient through improvement of transportation and services.

By the early twentieth century several directions in urban design had been established. One model, the Garden City, initiated by Ebenezer Howard in the late 1890s, was developed and advocated by Raymond Unwin, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Lewis Mumford, and others; it continues to be an influence today in "neotraditional" community design. A second approach was that of formalists such as Camillo Sitte, a nineteenth century Viennese architect who admired medieval urban patterns and treated urban spaces as aesthetic arrangements of building masses, facades, and street spaces. Such threads of formalist thinking have run through urban design history from ancient times into the present. Another variant of the formalist tradition, sometimes termed the "City Beautiful" movement, was rooted in Renaissance and Baroque urbanism and looked at the city as a network of formal streets and spaces, marked by striking monuments. A third major direction, the "Parks Movement", pioneered by Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, and George Kessler, focused on ways of introducing and integrating natural systems into the city at the metropolitan scale. Many American cities today enjoy the legacy of this movement. A fourth model, introduced by Tony Garnier and further developed by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and others in the first half of the twentieth century, looked at the city in terms of efficiency and function and tried to provide access to light, air, and space using new techniques of construction and transportation. In each of these models there was a strong belief that good city form contributed to the health and well-being of people, and that cities should be designed, yet each model hypothesized a different relation between people and spaces.

In the United States urban design as a distinct profession within the environmental design fields did not appear until after World War II when the federal urban renewal and highway programs stimulated rebuilding of major portions of American cities. Early in the process it became clear that special skills were needed to deal with environmental change at this scale - the city could not be treated merely as large scale architecture and the social/cultural context needed to be addressed.

In the past 25 years urban design in the United States has gone beyond its traditional concerns for formal and functional spatial organization to address the social/cultural context and the processes of community change. Today the field is being shaped in new ways by an increasingly pluralist society. The public realm is in the process of being redefined and reinvented. Environmental change is more incremental and subject to increasing public review. At the same time, many American cities are expanding at their edges at an unprecedented rate, while central cities are losing residents, jobs, and public support. A renewed focus on creative urban design is needed now more than ever.