Teaching Planning to City Planning Students. An Argument for the Studio / Workshop Approach

The studio / workshop was largely aban doned as a pedagogical device in city planning curricula during the late 1960s It has now been reintroduced, somewhat tentatively, in number of places The fun damental reason for this seems to be the recognition that urban studies and urban planning are not synonymous Teaching the two as if they are fails to recognize that planners plan This paper is an argument for the studio / workshop as an important means for providing planning students with an educational environment in which many of the basic skills that are central to the creative act of planning can be learnt and / or tested. In designing studio / workshop courses the lessons of the past must be borne in mind Recent advances in planning theory and methods need to be incorporated into the studio experience if it is to enhance the student's understanding of the planning process At the same time, the limitations of the studio / workshop must be recognized. This paper is offered as an invitation to the establishment of a dialogue among planning educators While there is some empirical evidence to support the arguments presented here the data base on which it draws is largely an anecdotal one