Fallacious argumentation in design review

Design review is an administrative mechanism for controlling the visual quality of proposed additions and alterations to the built environment in cities. Despite widespread application in the United States and in parts of Canada, the design review process is often contentious and unsatisfactory. The first author has found that this could be because the discourse associated with design review is generally fraught with problems, in particular with errors of reasoning. In this paper, we seek to address the need to make individuals, such as design review board members, staff and administrators, more familiar with the notion of fallacious argumentation. We do this by elaborating on six different types of fallacies, which occurred frequently in the discourse associated with three design review cases in one city. From a larger set of almost 20 types of fallacies, we found these six to be most prevalent in the design review cases we examined in detail.