The great divide: Differences in style between architects and urban planners

Abstract

Despite suggestions that urban planning and architecture are closely related, they constitute, at least methodologically speaking, two distinctly different subcultures. Such an assertion is here supported by each discipline's prescriptive literature, showing that planners and architects are expected to design in different ways. Such prescriptions, then, form a framework for situating each profession's fashions that have come and gone - whereas urban planning has mostly adopted an analytical, people-oriented, "left-brain" approach, architecture has embraced a more synoptic, theoretical, model-based, "right-brain" stance. Such findings are then verified using a case study design workshop that ..