12 Of The Best Designed Cities In The World
Published 08/31/2026
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Article Highlights
1
Compare twelve approaches to urban design through the decisions that shaped transport, housing, public space, and water systems.
2
Copenhagen's pedestrian streets, Barcelona's street grid, and Amsterdam's canals show how city design becomes visible at street level.
3
The selection focuses on how places work for everyday life, not simply on famous buildings or attractive skylines.
Article Sections
1How We Chose These Cities
2Copenhagen, Denmark
3Barcelona, Spain
4Amsterdam, Netherlands
5Vienna, Austria
AuthorVoyajeBoard Editors
Published08/31/2026
Read7 min
#city-guide
A city reveals its design in ordinary moments: crossing a street, finding a train, or stopping in a square between errands. A striking skyline can draw you in, but the spaces between its buildings decide how a day there feels.
These twelve cities offer different answers to familiar problems. Copenhagen makes room for walking; Vienna treats housing as civic infrastructure; Singapore plans around limited land and water. This is an editorial selection, not a scientific ranking or a claim that any city works equally well for everyone.
How We Chose These Cities
We looked for planning ideas that visitors can understand on the ground: connected transport, useful public space, distinctive street patterns, and responses to local geography. Each entry explains the idea, points to a place where it is visible, and suggests what to notice. The aim is to help you choose an interesting visit, not to reduce a complicated city to a score.
Copenhagen, Denmark
On Stroget, the space usually surrendered to through-traffic belongs to people on foot. The linked shopping streets make a useful starting point for seeing how Copenhagen uses pedestrian space: movement, browsing, and meeting friends share the same route.
Rather than treating the street as a single attraction, follow it through the center and notice where smaller streets and squares connect. The design question is practical: how much of a day can happen without returning to a car?
Look For: the relationship between pedestrian streets, shopfronts, and gathering places. Visit Copenhagen’s guide to Stroget explains the route.
Barcelona, Spain
The Eixample makes its organizing idea visible at almost every intersection. Ildefons Cerda’s nineteenth-century extension uses a grid of blocks with cut-off corners, opening the junctions into broader spaces instead of tight right angles.
Walk a few blocks before focusing on individual buildings. The repeated street pattern helps you read the district, while each corner offers a chance to compare traffic, crossings, and the space available to pedestrians. The lesson is not that a grid solves everything; it is that street geometry shapes everyday movement.
Look For: the chamfered corners and the contrast between an individual building and its surrounding block. The city’s architecture guide documents the Eixample plan.
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam’s canal ring is both a waterside setting and a major engineering project. Its seventeenth-century expansion combined drainage, canals, streets, and development into an organized extension of the city. UNESCO recognizes that relationship between water management and urban planning.
Follow a canal, cross a bridge, then turn onto a connecting street. Those changes in direction reveal more than a single waterfront photograph: the waterways and the land between them work together as a street plan.
Look For: how bridges and cross-streets connect the canal arcs. Read the UNESCO description of the canal ring for its planning context.
Vienna, Austria
Vienna’s municipal housing makes an unusually direct statement: homes can be a public undertaking, not simply a collection of private buildings. Karl-Marx-Hof, built between 1927 and 1930, is one of the best-known places to see that ambition in built form.
Its large scale matters, but so does the way housing is arranged around shared space. Approach it as a lived-in residential building, not an empty monument. View publicly accessible areas respectfully and avoid entering private spaces.
Look For: the relationship between entrances, courtyards, and the surrounding neighborhood. Vienna’s tourism board introduces its social housing buildings.
Tokyo, Japan
Shinjuku shows how a station can organize much more than a journey. Railway connections, shopping, work, and entertainment gather around the same transport hub, creating a district with several different centers of activity rather than one obvious front door.
Choose an exit before you travel, then compare the area outside it with another side of the station. That small planning decision changes the streets you encounter. Tokyo rewards attention to connections at neighborhood scale as much as attention to the wider network.
Look For: the way station exits distribute people into surrounding districts. Use GO TOKYO’s Shinjuku guide to orient your visit.
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Curitiba, Brazil
Curitiba is a useful counterpoint to the idea that ambitious transport must mean an underground railway. Express bus service began in 1974, and the system developed over time. The recognizable tube stations, prepayment, and level boarding belong to later developments, including the 1991 introduction of the direct-line service, not to one single launch in 1974.
The Distinction Matters: this is a story of successive changes to an operating city. Look at how vehicles, stations, and the street corridor fit together rather than treating an isolated bus stop as the whole design.
Look For: how a boarding arrangement changes the experience of using a bus. The city’s history of the express service and Brazil’s transport-sector study describe the chronology.
Medellin, Colombia
Medellin’s steep slopes make the challenge of connection easy to see. Metrocable Line K, operating commercially since August 2004, links hillside neighborhoods with the wider transit system. Here, an aerial cable car serves everyday urban journeys rather than functioning only as a sightseeing ride.
The useful perspective is the connection between stations and the places people live. A ride does not tell the whole story of a neighborhood, and a transport link should not be mistaken for a guarantee of step-free access to every surrounding street. Check the operator’s current accessibility and service information for your route.
Look For: how the cable route crosses terrain that would complicate a conventional street journey. Start with the operator’s Line K information.
Seoul, South Korea
Cheonggyecheon offers a different kind of urban change: replacing covered infrastructure with a public waterside corridor. The restoration project ran from 2003 to 2005, bringing a stream and walking space back into central Seoul.
Compare the corridor with the streets above it. The change in level, the water, and the walking route make the project’s purpose easier to understand than a before-and-after statistic alone. It is a place to notice how a city can reuse a central corridor, not evidence that every road-removal project will have the same result.
Look For: the connections between street level and the stream. The Seoul Metropolitan Government’s project history explains the restoration.
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Savannah, Georgia, USA
Savannah’s historic squares make public space part of the street pattern rather than an occasional destination at the end of it. The system grew from Oglethorpe’s eighteenth-century plan, with squares woven through the historic center.
Walk between several squares instead of choosing only one. Their repetition creates a recognizable rhythm, but the surrounding buildings and uses give each stop a different character. This is a city-design lesson you can follow at walking pace.
Look For: the way a square interrupts a street and becomes a place to pause. The city’s directory of historic squares helps you choose a route.
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore connects long-term land planning with a more detailed statutory Master Plan. Water is an equally revealing part of its design story. Its supply combines local catchment water, imports, reclaimed water known as NEWater, and desalinated water. It is not a country without natural water sources; it is a country that has developed several sources to meet its needs.
For a visit, use planning maps to look beyond a single landmark. Compare how housing, transport, open space, and infrastructure are arranged. The interesting question is how competing demands share limited land.
Look For: the relationship between the plans and the places you pass through. The Urban Redevelopment Authority explains the Master Plan, and the environment ministry explains the water system.
Kyoto, Japan
Kyoto’s history as the capital established in 794 gives its street pattern a long perspective. The grid is a useful starting point for understanding the city, but a plan on a map is only the beginning of a visit: the buildings, passages, and daily uses along a street give it its present character.
Choose a short route through the central streets and compare the larger avenues with the smaller streets between them. Leave time to notice the change in scale rather than racing between distant landmarks.
Look For: the contrast between an orderly street pattern and the individual places along it. The Kyoto tourism association’s historical overview provides background on the capital’s origins.
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Freiburg, Germany
Vauban makes a clear distinction between access for cars and storage for cars. Its transport concept includes residential streets without public parking, walking-speed traffic in those streets, and a separate network of walking and cycling routes. It should not be described as a district where all cars are banned.
The design is most interesting at the scale of a residential street. Notice how the space changes when parking is handled elsewhere, while remembering that this is a neighborhood where people live rather than a demonstration set built for visitors.
Look For: where vehicles can enter, where they can park, and how pedestrian routes connect. Freiburg’s Vauban overview describes the district’s approach.
Put The Ideas Into Your Trip
Choose one planning story that interests you and build a manageable route around it. A station district, a sequence of squares, or a few canal crossings can offer a clearer understanding than a day spent collecting disconnected landmarks. Save the places you want to investigate to your Travel Wishlist, then check current access and transport information before setting out.
Editorial Fact-Check: September 16, 2026. Linked primary sources provide historical and planning context. Access arrangements and transport services can change.
Places Mentioned In This Article
Takeaways
1.
Choose a city whose planning story interests you, then visit the streets, neighborhoods, or transport routes where that story is visible.
2.
Judge a design in its local context: a successful solution to one city's problem is not a universal blueprint for every destination.
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