Urban Design Studio as the Educational Core of the Course: A Comparison Study of Studio Subjects and Professional Priorities

Urban design emerged as an interdisciplinary profession in a world where its qualities were overwhelmed by its quantities and it was intended to improve the communities by rehabilitating the lost qualities. An accurate understanding of the urban design objectives and methods of achieving them will help us in this regard. Several educational programs have been offered throughout the world, and accordingly in Iran, towards achieving the expected objectives of the field. Given that the academic communities and the professionals are the main elements to achieve the expected objectives, their coordination may have a fundamental role in this regard. The comparison of the two groups constitutes the main goal of this study. In order for addressing this issue and attaining accurate definitions of urban design objectives, documents and sources have been reviewed and views and ideas of the theorists have been summarized. Since the proposed subjects in urban design studios play the most important role in preparation of students to enter urban design profession, prioritization of those objectives in professional community and urban design studio projects have been discussed and compared in this study. The extent to which the prioritizations of urban design goals were similar among the two groups, i.e. professionals and academic community, was studied in this way. To achieve this purpose, several interviews were conducted with urban design students in studied universities as well as with the professionals. Also a number of questionnaires were completed. The results show consistency in some cases and inconsistency in others. However, for both the professional and academic communities, the need to improve the existing approaches and methods seems inevitable. Consequently, professionals and their productions are affected by educational system, meanwhile according to the results of this study professional community lacks a perfect perception of urban design nature, so we can conclude that urban design educational system in Iran is not on the right road to address these shortcomings. Thus the Iranian educational system is incapable of covering the theoretical gaps in this field and eliminating the ambiguity of concepts in accordance with native characteristics. So, there are some priorities in society which are neglected to be discussed in urban design studios and in long term, and they can lead to wasting of resources, either human resources or time and money. However, it seems that differences between the professionals and the academic communities in terms of their priorities may be considered as an opportunity. In other words, academic community may help to improve the scientific and technical aspects of urban design professionals by introducing new topics and subjects to them and on the other hand, through the close relationship between the above groups, the academic community will be able to consider those projects in the urban design studios which are realistic and based on the needs of the society. It is through a close collaboration of the academic community and the professional groups that steps can be taken towards a quality urban design.