Urban planning is focused more on policy while design is focused on design. Planning has a larger scale of the whole city, while design focuses on how to improve smaller parts through design. Urban design would look at how do we improve this intersection or create more green space in this neighborhood, meanwhile planning looks at things like how do we alter the zoning codes to improve density and how do we encourage the construction of grocery stores in food deserts. Urban design as a field grew out of architecture and landscape architecture and while it can be entered from Urban planning or Sociology or geography or any of those similar disciplines, it has a more similar language and skill associations with those fields than with geography or sociology.