An evaluation of the current urban design process in order to derive critical success factors for the creation of a potential new urban design process framework

The current urban design process is top-down, i.e., generally the urban designers or planners design the urban environment and at a later stage the community may have some involvement. There are serious criticisms of this process as it may not touch the “ground” level community, and therefore, there is a serious risk these projects will fail to create sustainable environments. Accordingly, in order to overcome the drawbacks of the current top-down process, researches have discussed implementing a bottom-up process in order to deliver sustainable urban designs. In the meantime the current top-down urban design process may have features which may positively affect for the creation of sustainable urban designs. Accordingly, this research paper discusses the critical success factors of the current top down urban design process which supports for a creation of a new potential urban design process framework. The research methodology adopted for this research is case study re-search reinforced by grounded theory where the researcher has evaluated a live urban design project process in North-West England. The evaluation has resulted deriving seven critical success factors. The “leadership” of the process has been identified as one of the major critical success factors among the other critical success factors.