THE GREAT DIVIDE: DIFFERENCES IN STYLE BETWEEN ARCHITECTS AND URBAN PLANNERS

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 was run by urban planners but attended mostly by architects. Although the architects seemed willing to adopt the planner s people-oriented and analytical style, they eventually rejected such an approach in favor of more coherent, synoptic, and adversarial tactics. This yawning gap between planners' and architects' respective design styles is finally related back to various writers' pronouncements about mistakes being perpetrated to this day within both the urban planning and architectural professions. We conclude that, although transferring techniques from planning to architecture, or vice versa, is difficult, the good reasons behind the two disciplines' separate approaches need to be known and understood at a deeper level if they are ever to coexist in harmony.