The formal and informal tools of design governance

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a typological exploration of the ‘tools’ of ‘design governance’. It begins by exploring the generic literature that focuses on the range of instruments, approaches and actions ‒ the tools ‒ that policy makers deploy in order to steer public and private actors towards particular policy outcomes. Subsequently, how the notion of tools relates to practices of design governance is examined: first, encompassing three ‘formal’ categories of design governance tools ‒ guidance, incentive and control ‒ and second, by drawing on the work of the former Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) in England to introduce five categories of ‘informal’ design governance tools ‒ evidence, knowledge, promotion, evaluation and assistance. The result, and the key contribution of this paper, is a new and comprehensive (albeit evolving), design governance toolbox that extends from formal to informal tools and far beyond that which most policy makers recognize or use.

Notes

1. In reality urban design is not a linear process at all but instead a continuum in which stages in the process come around and around again and the shaping of place, knowingly or otherwise, never actually ends (see Carmona 2014a).

2. http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/planning/planningpolicyandlegislation/currentlegislation/acts.

3. http://planningjungle.com/consolidated-versions-of-legislation/.

4. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/39,821/taylor_review.pdf.

5. A quality determined by an amalgam of the other factors including the degree of prescription, governance level and ambition; specifically, whether performance-based or prescriptive.

6. Drawing from Lang (1996, 9) and Hall (1996, 8–40).

7. The full typology relates to ‘aesthetic control’, a term used in the UK up until the early 1990s, and mixes tools with administration. The reduced administration typology strips out the tools-only categories.

8. CABE did give grants to the network of regional Architecture and Built Environment Centres (ABECs) that emerged in the 2000s and administered the £45 million Sea Change arts-based regeneration programme. Both used ring-fenced government money, although CABE was in a powerful position to set the terms of the grant-giving and incentivize particular practices.

9. Carmona et al.’s (2010) framework for public sector urban design (Table 2) goes some way to addressing these concerns, with its category of education and participation, alongside the more formal categories of policy, regulation and management, and the cross-over categories of diagnosis and design. Another can be found in the five meta-categories of the New Zealand Urban Design Toolkit: research and analysis, community participation, raising awareness, planning and design, and implementation, although here the intention is to identify the full range of urban design tools rather than those relating to design governance and mixes formal with informal processes (Ministry for the Environment 2006).