Urban design, quality and economic values

the research acknowledges that the contemporary figure of urban designer not only has to have creative skills but also crucially needs to adapt a series of new skills as: understanding of the real estate development process and financial models which feed it; learning innovative public – private arrangements in mastering the skills of negotiation in order to ground their creative skills and achieve the delivery successful spatial results. Therefore this study aims to prove that the good quality in urban areas creates higher economic returns may be a convincing strategy in order to promote the quality of urban design and therefore it questions how urban design can be integrated or connected into the real estate development process which creates the development in our cities. Under this premise, first the term quality is scrutinized from different perspectives and then the question of how to achieve quality is dealt together with mentioning the importance of the quality in built environment. Afterwards the evolution of the quality is examined from different geographical contexts and then an extensive literature review is carried out in order to clarify in which ways better spatial quality creates higher economic returns. Finally the findings in the literature are put into experiment on a development project. The findings confirm that better spatial quality contributes higher economic returns. The findings imply the higher margins of returns contributed by better spatial design are more apparently evident on developers’ methods of project valuation while public sector significantly fails to see the extra margins appropriated by developers as a result of better public amenity.