Welcome to my website.
I am Matthew Carmona, Professor of Planning and Urban Design at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. This website provides a repository for my research and writing, including my blog: Urban Design Matters. I hope you find it useful.
My own research interests stem back to my time studying architecture at the University of Nottingham when, unexpectedly, the opportunity arose to also study planning at Masters level. I jumped at the chance, discovered urban design, and never looked back.
After completing my Masters I worked as an architect in private practice although was obviously not quite ready to leave university as in 1992 I signed up to do a PhD (part-time) under Prof Taner Oc at Nottingham. My PhD focussed on residential design guidance and began a line of research that I have pursued ever since and which I now call Design Governance. Soon after starting the PhD I applied for and got a job as a researcher working with Prof John Punter, first at the University of Reading and later at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow. Together we wrote the book, The Design Dimension of Planning.
When, two years later, that project finished, I was fortunate to return to the University of Nottingham as a lecturer. It was there that I conceived my best known book, Public Places Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design. Faced with teaching a class in urban design theory and not finding a suitable text book, I decided to write my own. My great friend and colleague, the late Dr Steve Tiesdell, contributed hugely to the first two editions of that book which is now in its third edition.
Three years after joining Nottingham, the University (in its wisdom) decided to close the programme on which I was teaching. This spurred me into applying for a lectureship at University College London (UCL). I joined UCL in 1998 and, again, never looked back. UCL is an immensely rich and rewarding place to work for someone interested in the built environment, and here my research interests and work have burgeoned.
At UCL I have addressed questions of value and design, public space design and management, and everything to do with the governance of design. It has brought me into contact with amazing students and fantastic colleagues with whom to collaborate, including the late great Prof Sir Peter Hall, Wendy Clarke, Prof Nick Gallent, Prof Claudio de Magalhaes, Dr Filipa Wunderlich, Dr Lucy Natarajan, Valentina Giordano, Dr Tommaso Gabrieli, Dr Joao Bento, and Dr Jingyi Zhu.
Between 2003 and 2011 I was Head of The Bartlett School of Planning and after stepping down led the formation and development of the Place Alliance. Initially this focussed on collaboration and campaigning to raise issues of place quality up the national agenda in England. Today it focusses on the publication and dissemination of research as a feed into the national conversation on design.
In 2016 and 2025/6 I was Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. In 2018 I launched place-value-wiki which is an open source repository for evidence on the health, economic, social and environmental benefits of a better designed built environment and after that collaborated with UN-Habitat and BMA on the pan-European Urban Maestro project, leading to my latest book Urban Design Governance. Since then I have been working on projects examining Inequality in Housing Design Quality and the thorny question of urban beauty, about which a new book will be available in 2026.
I have been fortunate to win win a number of awards, including the RTPI Academic Award for Research Excellence in 2015, 2022 and 2024, and the RTPI Sir Peter Hall Award for Wider Engagement in 2016 and 2025. In 2018 I won the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Prize Best Published Paper award.
My full CV can be found under the Publications tab above.
The work goes on …
Matthew
(January 2026)
@ProfMCarmona
Matthew Carmona 