Rethinking the Relationship Between Urban Design and Planning: Back to the Roots

Today the field of urban design has emerged as an important area of intellectual pursuit, involving theory, research, and pedagogy, all intended to inform and improve practice. Also, there has been a progressive differentiation between urban planning and urban design. How has this differentiation occurred? This article calls for a return to planning values in contemporary increasing differentiation between planning and urban design. A direct explanation of urban design nature -without stumbling into a simplistic anti-design approach- is a necessary step forward in understanding of differentiation trend and real values in planning process. This article reverse the imposing perspective of neoliberalism, global competition and new urbanism to trace reassertion of planning values (such as public interest and social justice) through explanation of fundamental tension between design and science and changes in planning process. It signals right from that an intention to tamper with the familiar interpretation of urban design theories to shake up current flow of theorization to allow other, more radical thoughts to be emerge. The article will conclude that planners and policy-makers should be involved with public vales more than anything else and considers both fields (urban design and planning) in a neoliberal dominated world of global competition, particularly as personified by the diversified visions produced by the New Urbanism.