Cambridge Urban Design Guidelines

Setting the Stage for Design Excellence

Gehl is working with the City of Cambridge to redesign the City’s Urban Design Guidelines. Gehl’s role will be to develop a set of guiding principles and success metrics for the Guidelines, anchored in global best practices, and observational research of Cambridge’s public spaces and public life.

Gehl is a sub-consultant to OverUnder, an award-winning design firm that specializes in helping civic, cultural, and academic clients achieve sophisticated and distinctive designs with lasting impact. With a wider team of specialists in climate resiliency, zoning, and public realm the Gehl team is working together over an 18-month period to develop a vision for Cambridge’s Urban Design Guidelines.

To redesign the City’s Urban Design Guidelines, the Gehl team began by reviewing global best practices and existing Cambridge documents, including the review of 48 guidelines from around the world and interviews of three municipalities implementing the guidelines in their cities. The team explored how these guidelines took shape from inception to rollout, with focus on development, implementation, organization, updates and adaptation, and sustainability and equity. Gehl will use this research to identify success criteria around style; Equitable Urban Quality, Sustainability and Place Identity; Public & Inter-Agency Engagement; User-Friendliness and Adaptability of the Guidelines and content.

Gehl is also leading a public life study to inform the guidelines. The purpose of this study is to:

• Gather insights focused on how people move through and spend time in Cambridge today

• Reveal opportunities to update the guidelines based on people’s lived experience of the built environment

• Serve as a baseline of Cambridge public space and public life quality, for future comparison

The outcome of this work will be the generation of data used to inform the guiding principles that set the foundation for the final guidelines to be published at the end of 2023.