The Role of Urban Design in Achieving the UN SDGs

The impact of growing inequality and poverty among nations on spatial and social concerns has become critical, leading to environmental and humanitarian crises like pollution, resource depletion, and unemployment, which hinder urban development and sustainable growth. Addressing climate issues is urgent due to their global repercussions, prompting a search for comprehensive solutions globally. Various action plans and agendas, from Our Common Future to the 2030 Agenda, aim to enhance quality of life through environmental awareness, development strategies, technological innovation, and social structure change. Existing research provides a framework to examine how the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as tools for sustainable urban development. However, there is insufficient data on how urban design dimensions and objectives interact with SDGs, which is critical for urban sustainability. This research aims to propose a supplementary methodological framework for analyzing, graphically representing, and assessing the impact of urban design on SDGs. It demonstrates an integrated assessment framework for addressing urban design's multidimensionality in a structured manner, revealing its role in achieving the SDGs. The methodology involves a literature review of relevant documents on sustainable development processes, goals, and urban design dimensions and objectives to analyze and evaluate the impact of urban design on SDGs using qualitative research methods. The collected data underwent cross-concept analysis incorporating rankings and narratives. The discussion then focuses on how SDGs are embedded in urban design through coding.