Urban Design & Landscape Architecture: Two Professions, One Goal?

Urban Design and Landscape Architecture are designated as new arts /sciences that are formed through a combination of different artistic and scientific disciplines. The formal emergence of urban design happened in 1960's while landscape architecture existed from the beginning of 20th century. Success of these fields even after a century can mainly attributed to their focus on environmental quality of public realms in cities. The modernity of these two fields and activities regarding their goal and their view towards the aspects of the public domain, have resulted in ambiguous definitions which have made distinguishing them difficult. This article reviews the background features of the two fields such as definitions and approaches to understanding concepts and signifies the separating and identification points with suitable suggestions at the end. The results of this work show that the differences of the two fields, are related to the "scale and functional domain", "intrinsic emphases on particular environmental variables" and their "backgrounds". The identification pointsalso depend on their association with architecture, urbanism and environmental design and management as the most important task.