Urban Design Governance (Urban Maestro)

The primary aim of Urban Maestro is to stimulate political, professional and civil society support for the more effective use of urban design governance approaches by raising awareness of their potential amongst decision makers and other agents of change at the appropriate levels. It won’t be the objective of the research project to determine whether ‘good’ or ‘poor’ design has been achieved in any given circumstances, but instead to explore the impacts that design governance practices and different modes of leadership are having on shaping both the environment within which decision-making on design occurs (the process impact) and on what that means for the places that are being shaped and/or re-shaped over time (the outcome impact).

Good urban design governance is needed. Throughout Europe, local, regional and national administrations have established sophisticated urban development control systems that are meant to ensure the compliance of urban development with basic urban design qualities. These systems also define the rules through which development interests can express their aspirations and protect their interests through urban design. For every built environment intervention, the line-up of stakeholders, the leadership and the power relationships are different, although design remains a common and constant means through which the built environment is negotiated and re-negotiated over time.

Within this context, the governance of design is primarily concerned with establishing and shaping the decision-making environment within which choices about the design of particular projects (large or small) are later made. In other words, it is not concerned with actually designing projects, but instead with setting the parameters within which others design.

Recent research has demonstrated the profound health, social, economic and environmental benefits that flow from a well-designed built environment (www.place-value-wiki.net), but not all tools and processes are equally successful at positively shaping such places, and more often than not, one mechanism introduced for one purpose (e.g. to keep traffic safe) may have unintended consequences elsewhere (e.g. in reducing walkability).

Most politicians, scholars and other stakeholders would agree that the quality of urban design matters when it comes to promoting the achievement of sustainable development, but very few would be able to explain “Why”, and even less “How” to achieve urban spatial quality. These are issues that the project will explore, notably through examining the often untapped potential of the soft or informal tools of design governance.

The potential to move beyond formal design governance tools. Formal, or conventional tools for design governance (the hard power) typically include instruments such as development plans, design standards, state subsidies and investment, construction permits, development consent, urban development charges, expropriation modalities and a wide diversity of public-private arrangements.

If formal design governance instruments work well at preventing the worst forms of development, they are often less successful at stimulating the best. Despite the creativity of many built environment professionals, beyond their historic cores, European cities are characterised by sprawl where a true urban realm is often absent and where characteristics of car dominance, hard landscape, single use, segregation, and so forth, predominate.

While Europe is often seen from the outside as the patria of “good” urbanism, the Davos Declaration was forthright in its criticism of “the growth of faceless urban sprawl and irresponsible land use” across Europe. This will vary from the sorts of car-reliant, infrastructure heavy but social infrastructure light suburbs that surround many of Europe’s cities to the hard inhuman overdevelopment that increasingly features in too many city centres. Both are focussed on achieving short-term economic benefits at the expense of long-term health, social, cultural and environmental outcomes. They call into question the capacity of public authorities to stimulate urban spatial quality, and deliver sustainable urban development.

Such observations are not limited to the European context. In its 2009 global report on Human Settlements dedicated to urban planning, UN-Habitat noted that “traditional approaches to urban planning, particularly in the developing world, have largely failed to promote equitable, efficient and sustainable human settlements and to address twenty-first century challenges, including rapid urbanization, shrinking cities and ageing, climate change and related disasters, urban sprawl and unplanned peri-urbanization, as well as urbanization of poverty and informality”.

Softer, informal forms of intervention may be more effective. In fact, despite the emphasis placed on rules and regulation in the dominant design governance practices of Europe, there is a much larger toolkit available to the public sector through which to positively shape the built environment. Numerous national and local administrations, as well as a number of civil society groups have taken innovative initiatives to stimulate the emergence of higher quality urban development through the development of new tools and processes.

For example, research examining the period 1999-2011 in the UK has identified a wide range of both formal (required by statute) and informal (non-statutory) tools that were in active use during the period. These range from direct financial incentives to secure a better designed built environment, to guidance and educational initiatives, to the use of peer review and different forms of advocacy (Carmona et al, 2016, Design Governance, the CABE Experiment, Routledge).

Reports from Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Spain and other European Member States show seemingly interesting results in the form of multi-stakeholders design platforms, citizen-led urban observatories, urban quality negotiation schemes, urban labs, knowledge building, capacity development, advocacy, certified competitions and awards, neighbourhood and thematic committees but also direct and indirect technical assistance or mentoring to local or regional authorities (EFAP 2012, Survey on Architectural Policies in Europe). Few of these are required in legislation, and instead act to shape the design decision-making environment through encouraging, informing, nudging, and assisting stakeholders towards better design practices. Yet little systematic work has been done in order to capture and share best practice.

The same is apparent globally. Whilst there is some evidence of innovative practices in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and a few other countries, in contexts of rapid urbanization, notably in emerging economies or in the developing world, where informality is the norm, urban development is often hardly controlled, or controlled only crudely through formal (hard power) instruments of urban design governance. Demonstrating the effectiveness of softer approaches to urban design governance in Europe will have potential for significant application in emerging economies, the developing world and crisis areas, contexts in which citizen participation and the establishment of multi-stakeholders platforms has often been presented as the one-size-fits-all solution to urban challenges.

Synergies between innovation in urban design governance and urban finance. Urban planning and design does not work in isolation. Beautiful design solutions are of little value if not connected to a legal and economic system that will allow for their implementation and long-term maintenance. For this reason urban design governance emcompasses the spatial, economic and legal dimensions of decision making over the form and shape of the urban environment, and urban design governance outcomes and processes are deeply shaped by the availability of economic resources and the nature of financing instruments for urban projects.

The challenge is to enter a virtuous circle in which the capacity of local authorities to raise finance and take decisions is eased by their reputation for careful stewardship over their urban environment, so that the urban environment itself becomes an attractor to investment (private as well as public) and value added from a public interest perspective.

Whichever mechanism is selected, there is the potential to use financial tools alongside or as part of the design governance toolbox in such a way that ‘good behaviour’ is rewarded – including the delivery of high quality design – and ‘poor behaviour’ discouraged, notably the creation of unsustainable development. The critical task for the state is not simply to incentivise development, but to incentivise high quality development. In this endeavour, financial incentivisation, either directly or indirectly, can form a key weapon in the design governance arsenal. Innovative financing instruments, notably when directly connected to aspirations of civil society for higher quality environments, can also offer an entry point for local authorities to engage in softer urban design approaches (see the Eutropian book for examples).

Knowledge on design governance innovations is insufficiently shared across Europe. Whilst European academics, organisations and practitioners have made significant contributions to debates about urban quality and European examples are often held up as exemplars, there has been little attempt to systematically learn from the European experiences beyond individual cases. In part this is because of the complexity of the diverse systems of European urban governance, and because of the perception that urban design and urban finance is beyond the limits of European institutions’ competencies. Arguably it is the absence of pan-European networks with a focus on sharing practice that leads many practitioners, globally (including in Europe), to look to the US for models (good or bad) to emulate.