Urban design job listings are up 102%. This might be why

With more and more people moving to urban areas, there’s an ever-growing need for people who can think at the scale of a city in order to solve problems. Experts in urban design are very much in demand.

Fast Company’s new analysis of job listings across several design disciplines puts a number on it: job postings for urban designers are up 102% compared to the previous year.

This boom may reflect the increasing relevance of the kind of work urban designers do, which is to create functioning communities and regions. Spanning architecture, city planning, landscape architecture, and urban development, urban design takes in the whole picture of a city and looks for ways that interventions at all scales can improve the system.

“It’s really a field of integration,” says Tyler Patrick, chair of the planning and urban design department at Sasaki, a large multidisciplinary design firm. Patrick says that Sasaki has been hiring more and more urban designers every year, and including their input on nearly every project. “It’s a field that continues to add a lot of value.”

Part of rise in demand for urban designers may stem from the fact that the way cities operate is inseparable from the issues of the day. From sustainability to community health to economic development, some of society’s biggest challenges can—and perhaps must—be addressed at the urban level. “Every project we go into we try to understand, How does this fit into the system? How does it change the system?” says Nick Leahy, co-CEO of the design firm Perkins Eastman.

Urban designers are typically trained to use sophisticated data analysis tools, including geographic information systems (GIS) and site planning software like Autodesk Forma. These programs and visualization tools help to quantify the ways design decisions play out at the level of a city system. Leahy says this type of analysis is increasingly critical in projects, whether it’s a 2,000-acre plan in Mumbai or the redevelopment of a key parcel in a city’s downtown.

And there’s plenty of work to do. Kris Krider, chair of the urban design and preservation division of the American Planning Association, says that the rise in urban design job postings is not surprising, especially in the U.S. “We’re looking at a lot of redevelopment within our existing cities and our communities, and it gets complicated pretty quick,” Krider says.

Urban designers, who are skilled in interdisciplinary thinking, are well suited to this messy job, able to weave new elements into the fabric of a living city. “This is not a greenfield site where you can design the perfect town square,” Krider says, using an industry term for undeveloped land. “You’ve got to fix stuff.”

The increased demand is likely to continue, especially given trends in American cities to try to move away from the car-centric planning of the past, and to make even suburban areas more vibrant, walkable, and livable. It would be hard to argue that most communities in the U.S. yet check all those boxes. That’s part of the reason, he says, that this type of designer can expect job security. “Urban designers never run out of work to do because there are so many mistakes to correct.”

This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings.