Press Releases
KPF Review Urban Planning: Elevating the City
KPF’s urban-scale projects aim to advance cities through impactful design.
Our approach to urbanism stems from the belief that cities are the engines of shared prosperity, the crucibles of the cultural vanguard, and the beacons of social progress; they always have been, and they will continue to be. However, around the world, cities face ongoing moments of change based on the particular dynamics of the age.
Challenges such as diminished downtown vibrancy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing affordability crisis, and the threats associated with climate change have raised urgent questions with which urban design must contend.
In many established city centers, older Central Business Districts (CBDs) are unable to respond to changing patterns of urban life and meet today’s demand for mixed-use environments. KPF’s response is to create diverse, vibrant districts that innovatively synthesize infrastructural capacity with humanistic design.
Hudson Yards, which transformed Manhattan’s far West Side, is an example of a mixed-use Central Social District (CSD) combining state-of-the-art workplaces with residences, shopping, food and beverage, as well as arts and entertainment.
These Central Social Districts (CSDs)—as opposed to traditional monofunctional CBDs—combine housing, tech-enabled workplaces, and enriching amenities with transit, embracing diversity of uses and users while delivering economic and environmental resilience. We create these environments by refreshing and reconnecting existing elements, imagining what new functions old buildings might serve, and filling gaps in the urban and suburban fabric with sensitive interventions that add density and activate formerly fringe areas.
We also apply the principles of urbanism and the Central Social District to places that fall outside the conventional definition of a “city.” Our belief in cities drives us to cultivate quality urban environments within places such as airport-oriented developments, large-scale resorts, mega-projects rising in the Middle East, and other novel paradigms.
New Songdo City, in Korea, is an example of a highly connected new city that capitalizes on access to global transportation links and smart-city design to create a new home for innovation.
Hear from KPF’s urban planning and design experts about how they leverage technology to elevate cities.
The stories below explore how KPF leverages technology and design expertise to create coherent places that give users a sense of comfort and fascination in a variety of conditions. Urban Interventions documents how we approach the challenge of reinvention, reconnection, and densification through project examples now on our boards. New Cities consists of three essays that explore how we create quality urban experiences within a particular paradigm of new development. Assessing Our Impact details how completed KPF urban plans have gone on to successfully catalyze development and urban vibrancy.
