We don’t give much thought to our daily commute—the routes we take to get to school or to our jobs. Those same networks of roads and sidewalks we take for granted every day, plus the parks and plazas we pass by, are planned by urban designers.

Urban designers are in charge of arranging city structures: they design plazas and parks, groups of buildings, and the roads and sidewalks that connect them all. They help make cities accessible, efficient, and visually pleasing for the people who live there. “There’s nothing cooler than seeing people using the walkways and passing the city features that you helped to design,” says Ashley Montgomery, an architecture student at Hampton University.

Video produced by Lisa Sadler, Virginia Sea Grant Science Multimedia Intern.