Design governance: theorizing an urban design sub-field

Abstract This paper introduces and theorizes the practices of design governance: the process of state-sanctioned intervention in the means and processes of designing the built environment in order to shape both processes and outcomes in a defined public interest. The paper is in three parts. The first briefly addresses ‘why’ the public sector should seek to intervene in design, in other words the motivations behind design governance. The second and third parts address respectively the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions; what is design governance and how does it occur? They do this by dissecting the concept and investigating a number of recurring debates in the literature that reveal key conceptual threads and problematics running through these practices. The result, and the key contribution of this paper, is a new set of concepts through which to understand the governance of design as a distinct and important sub-field of urban design.

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