What ever is happening to urban planning and urban design? Musings on the current gap between theory and practice

Over the last decades, the gap between disciplinary dreams and real outcomes has been growing in the field of urban planning and urban design. Great difficulties are evident in problematic contexts as the Italian case, but in other countries as well, where planning and design traditions have certainly been reliable and influential (e.g. the Netherlands and the UK). However, there is an astonishing lack of critical reflections within the disciplinary field. The aim of this paper is to focus on a set of critical issues, and to suggest new directions in the current practice. This means to deal with three challenges of great importance: how to overcome the traditional divide between planning and design theory and practice; to select suitable and mutually consistent paradigms within each disciplinary field; and to outline a place-based approach to actual problems in regulation, visioning and urban designing.