Can We Extend Design Governance to the Big Urban Design Decisions

Jonathan Barnett

School of Design, The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

The first of Matthew Carmona’s two papers is a thoughtful and dispassionate discussion of design governance in a wide range of situations (Carmona, 2016). It provides an illuminating way of thinking about a basic urban design question: how do you ensure that an urban design or architectural design concept is actually implemented? Implementation of design at an urban scale may take place over an unknown amount of time, the design’s components may go forward on different schedules, and the actual developers and designers for significant parts of the concept may not yet have come forward when the original design is being determined.

Clearly, as Professor Carmona explains, the powers of local government can be a basic part of urban design implementation, although these powers are often used in a simplistic way, when more judgement and interpretation would be appropriate. Sophisticated draftsmanship is needed in writing more flexible regulations because such flexibility can be seen as a misuse of power, or the substitution of individual preferences for publicly agreedupon standards.

However, there is a bigger question: how is government intervention affecting the design of the built environment, or the preservation of the natural environment? When you look at the full range of design issues affecting the built and natural environments, it turns out that many of the big governmental decisions about cities, suburbs and towns are made outside the context of their urban design implications, so that their powerful, even formative, effects on urban design, or the natural or agricultural landscape, are not even considered when the decisions are being made.

The issues affecting existing and future development created by protection from flood surges and rising sea levels, the provision of government-funded infrastructure such as the design of high-speed rail lines and their station locations, or even something as simple as the extension of water and sewer lines to a new area, are powerful influences on urban design.

Yes, these decisions could be catalogued as urban design controls, but as the controls are usually formulated with little concern about their urban design implications, they are not design governance ‒ they are just plain governance. There is a long list of these controlling decisions which are made with little awareness of their design implications. In the United States the whole apparatus of what we call zoning and subdivision was formulated with only the most general understanding of the design of the built environment and the preservation of the natural environment. The permitted zoning in many historic parts of cities and towns makes the existing buildings worth more as building sites. The maximum permissible street grades found in most US subdivision ordinances make developers regrade the entire property, destroying all the natural land contours and vegetation. A sharp rise in

the frequency of what had been ‘100-year floods’ has been one of the results. There is a current controversy in New York City over what the Municipal Art Society calls ‘The Accidental Skyline’. Extremely tall, thin residential towers are made possible by a formerly obscure provision of the zoning law which enables developers to acquire un-used zoning rights from adjacent properties without owning the underlying land and buildings. The extra-tall towers can appear anywhere that a developer is able to make the right deals. Governance, but not design governance.

The special design districts and their associated systems of incentives and controls begun long ago in New York City, and now found in many places, are attempts to manage decisions that the City would make anyway. The change has been to make them informed design decisions, not accidental side-effects of measures which were either not thought through, or had been instituted for some other purpose. Historic District Commissions, Design Review Boards, Planned Unit Developments and other design governance measures are attempts to improve decisions governments would have made anyway. At the local level, there has been some success in improving the built environment through design governance, although nowhere near enough.

At the national, state or provincial level, where many of the most important city and regional design decisions are made, there is very little design governance. Responding to this situation involves the second part of Professor Carmona’s discussion, the range of available tools for relating design to public policy (Carmona, 2017). His presentation is wide-ranging and well-organized, but most of the available tools that might apply to the larger scale of decision-making appear to be outside the process where the design decision is actually made. For example, advocacy, or even downright opposition, can change a governmental decision, but is very crude as an instrument of design. Official guidance is often so vague as to be meaningless, and — in the case of environmental impact reviews — can be counter-productive, as no impact becomes a superior outcome to a good impact.

It is banal to say so, but design is a process. It requires negotiation among conflicting objectives. If the designer is not present when the decision is being made, it is very hard to influence the outcome. How can the urban designer get a seat at the table when the highway engineers are choosing routes and determining the location of the entrances and exits, which in turn will determine the future course of development in the area? How can the urban designer influence the configuration of on and off ramps so that the highway interchange does not become the central design feature of the future urban development? How to convince political decision makers that the land around highway access points is a special district and should be treated that way in the development regulations? If none of these issues is addressed as part of a comprehensive design that goes beyond engineering the highway, whatever design guidance, incentives or controls are issued for the individual

buildings will have only a minor influence on what is really happening.

The same questions come up with transit lines. Transit-oriented development is a familiar phrase, but who is deciding where the lines should go and where the stations should be? Do these decision makers understand the design implications for future development and are they taking them into account? These big location decisions may have been made long ago in the UK and Europe, but they are a very current issue in China and India, and are still important in North and South America. Where to build new development may be the most important urban design decision of all, particularly the question of which forest, river valley or agricultural land should be opened up for new construction. In the UK the countryside has had strong advocates, and decisions about it have been carefully considered for many years, but in China, despite a very strict rule-book governing development, these fundamental design decisions are being made politically, and the designer’s role only begins with the site plan, after the real design decisions have been made.

What a designer can do, as part of decision making that involves many conflicting factors,

is to help everyone visualize the long-term effects of different policy alternatives, show how

bad outcomes can be avoided, conflicts resolved and a desirable outcome achieved, which

is what should happen in any design process.

Some next steps in considering design governance at the national and regional scale would be to look at the mechanisms for the big decisions about the design of cities and countryside, find ways to incorporate designers and design into the process, and then institute the appropriate means of design governance, so that the design is carried through to implementation.

（文章来源：Journal of Urban Design excerpted）