The road to masterplanning for change and the design of resilient places

Knowing what to design is the foresight that tomorrow’s cities need more than anything. This paper presents the Urban Design Studies Unit of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow’s coordinated approach to research in different areas of urbanism, and how we used such approach in evidence‐based masterplanning. To explain what is unarguably a complex approach to the design of the city, this paper will start with an overview into our group’s point of view on cities, and continue with a short summary of our journey to learn some aspects of how cities are. We will touch upon a few milestones only, but hopefully enough to explain the questions that have led us to what we call ‘Masterplanning for Change’, our normative approach to city design.