This master arises from the experience of more than ten years of the quality doctorate Public Space and Urban Regeneration: Art and Society giving birth to the master degree Design Urbano organized by the UB, the BCD and the Centro Portugués de Design and that was developed during several editions since 1999 to 2006.

The object of the master is urban design. It is a confusing concept that needs certain annotations to not induce to misunderstandings.

Urban Design can be understood as the process of giving form to the physical conditions for life in cities. From this point of view, it can be understood as the art of "making the city ". It covers the design of buildings, of groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and the establishment of the processes that make possible a sustainable development.

With independence of definitions, almost all the authors who have written on the topic, indicate four basic characteristics of the Urban Design:

1. Urban Design takes the city and its public space as an object of study, the territory of the processes of the public sphere, but that must not be confused with it.

2. Urban Design, in its processes, is based on the project disciplines and inherits a long tradition that has its origins in the Renaissance.

3. Urban Design possesses strong interdisciplinary components that are structural to its performances.

4. Urban Design involves, necessarily, the cooperative work in multidisciplinary teams.

These aspects define the structure of this master which takes the public space of the city as its study object, taking in consideration a city which has turned into into an international model: Barcelona.

The master, with independence of the necessary contributions of contents, is orientated towards a multidisciplinary approaches and contributions of Sculpture, Drawing, Design, Architecture, Urbanism, Landscape, Engineering, History of the Art, Geography and Environmental Psychology.

It is important to notice that urban design is not a recognized profession. There is no professional association that determines what has or not to appear in the syllabus of a course, or what competences, skills and knowledge are needed to be able to practise as urban designer.

Urban designers need a wide knowledge on the city, and the ways of doing that make possible its better working. Because of that it is necessary to know how the planning system works, how to assess what turns especially to an specific place, how to revitalize the places that have suffered processes of degradation, how to act in the preservation of the built heritage, how to make the most from the landscape, how to think the future of the urban operations, be small or big, how to involve the neighbours in the development of the projects, how to guarantee that the projects are done, how to exactly report, how to negotiate and how to write design policies and recommendations.

The usual products of Urban Design are:

[A] The design of new cities,

[B] The design of urban precincts, be new or renewed,

[C] The design of elements of infrastructure and

[D] The design of individual elements that add value to the city

This clarification helps to draw the scope and the limits of this course. A course of Urban Design, is not a course neither of architecture, nor of planning, nor of art based on the personal work. A course of Urban Design is a course of urban project in which there is contributed the vision of the complexity and diversity of the urban reality.

Hence is fundamental the contribution of several disciplines, so much in what concerns to the contents as to the work methodologies since they give answer to the polyhedral character of the city.

But this course is given in a certain context that defines and limits its scope. We will approach the problematic of the Urban Design aiming to handle the general processes, but the area of work will be what we can name the Design of the city surface and that of Public Art.