Interpretation:

Summary:

• Introduction
• In 1956 Jose Luis Sert convened a conference at Harvard GSD to assemble evidence on behalf of a desired discipline he called urban design.
• A wide array of participants seemed to concur that the widening mid-century intellectual split between the ‘art of building’ and the ‘systemic nature of planning’ was not helpful to city building or post war rebuilding.
• The notion of a new discipline, and the focus on urbanisation, were occurring in both the United States and Europe.
• Participants hoped to stem the perceived split between design and planning.
• Shortly after, Harvard would begin to offer post graduate urban design curricula, lending weight to the idea of professionally trained urban designers essential for a rapidly urbanising world.
• Urban design is the ‘part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the city’, ‘the most creative phase of city planning in which imagination and artistic capacities play the important part’. (Sert)
• At the beginning of the conferred Sert identified an ambitions goal: ‘to find the common basis for the joint work of the architect, landscape architect, and the city planner’... ‘Urban design being wider in scope than these three professions’.
• 50 years later, a precise definition of urban design has not been accepted.
• In a world producing unprecedented urban environments, urban design is an increasingly sought-after expertise.
• Territories, both spatial and conceptual; defined as a ‘spheres of action’.

• Urban design and the ten spheres of urbanistic action

  1. The bridge connecting planning and architecture 
     • UD to mediate between plans and projects, to translate objectives of planning into physical strategies, to translate public policy and program into architectural concepts of appropriate urban form
     • Planning before design is subtly incorrect, it is not a sequential process, rather an interactive and iterative one.
  2. A form-based category of public policy 
     • Agreeing on specific attributes of good urbanism to encourage these through regulatory requirements.
     • This includes the incorporation of formal and aesthetic judgements in addition to existing measurable criteria, public policy pertaining to environmental quality and beauty
  3. The architecture of the city 
     • Seek to control the shaping of the public, and therefore common, areas of the city.
     • Shaping public space is considered the first role of the architect/urbanist.
  4. Urban design as restorative urbanism 
     • The form of the pre-industrial western city holds immense power over city dreaming amongst professionals and the public.
     • The traditional city seems at once legible, human scaled, manageable, and aesthetically pleasing.
     • Such elements are absent in the modern metropolis, why not mobilise to regain these?
     • New urbanist’s attempt to do this, advocating a return to ‘time-tested’ principles of urbanism, now appealing to a disillusioned suburban culture
     • The public is particularly sympathetic, for a return to walkability, civic streets and squares, low rise, high density, defined neighbourhoods gathered around valuable institutions, intricate layers of vehicle free human space still holding much appeal.
  5. Urban Design as an art of “place-making” 
     • The provision of distinct, lively, appealing places for congregation to alleviate the homogeneity of many contemporary urban areas.
     • The creation of exceptional places to serve human purposes.
     • Is modern life able to be practiced under traditional iconography?
  6. Urban design as Smart Growth 
     • Advocating for suburban growth management and reinvestment strategies for older rings around city centres
     • With aims to control sprawl and make environmental stewardship a more overt part of urban thinking
     • Opportunistic expression, over 90% of development takes place at the periphery of existing urbanisation
     • Suburban areas are not non-urban, they merely provide a different urban experience, or intensity.
     • The contemporary urban designer will be more conversation minded and smarter about managing land and resources.
     • To manage urban growth requires dealing with elements that cut across jurisdictional boundaries - like land conservation, water management and mobility
  7. Urban Design as the infrastructure of the city 
     • Engineering criteria are not themselves sufficient city making tools, and transportation is just one category of urban infrastructure.
     • The urban designer attempts to address the calibration of mobility with other social needs while advancing new, or reviving old, methods to integrate city form and transportation systems.
     • This is what fuels the modern fascination with transit oriented developments.
     • The twentieth century loves affair with the car - the ultimate personal mobility device, has limited the range of conceptualising urban form and transportation.
  8. Urban design as landscape urbanism 
     • The incorporation of ecology, landscape architecture and infrastructure into the urban discourse.
     • Sert’s 1956 conference produced rhetoric on the integrity of landscape architecture to urban design.
     • Valuable urban design is to be found at the intersection of ecology, engineering, design, careful programming, and social policy.
     • Nolli is a binary conception of the city being made of buildings and voids, the white (and the various hues of) today radically green in landscape urbanism.
  9. Urban design as visionary urbanism 
     • Urban design vision and hypothesising models for spatially organising communities
     • Design professionals cannot be mere absorbers of public opinion while waiting for consensus to build, they must offer new ideas as well.
     • The heroic form giving tradition may be in decline, having witnessed immense harm from universal ideas.
     • New visions may not be seen in deeds, but in understandings of urban culture.
     • How directly engaged in the real world should urban design be?
  10. Urban design as community advocacy 
      • Urban design connotes large scale thinking - about substantial settlements of the scale of grand urbanism
      • Urban design now approximates what was once termed community planning.
      • “A store is also a storekeeper” - Jane jacobs
      • Urban design has an association with citizen participation
      • The focus of planning increasingly appears to the public as abstract, and unattached to immediate concerns and daily needs.
      • Urban designers are not shapers of cities, as much as custodians of the qualities valued by the community, qualities that need protection and fostering.

Conclusion

• Urban Design as a frame of mind
• Urban design has emerged as an important part of managing modernisation.
• Instead of moving toward professional specificty, urban design has come to represnet the many ways for engaging and facilitating urbanity.
• Urban design as the process which produces or enhances urbanity.
• Perhaps Sert is disappointed that half a century later there remains a ‘fog of amiable generalities’.
• Urban design is less a technical skillset than a mind set among varying disciplines seeking quality in community form, and the enhancement of urbanity.
• One may rejoice in the many spheres of urbanistic action for passionate lovers of cities.

Interpretation:

Summary:

• Introduction
• Urban Design: the process of shaping places for people; new and old, physical and social
• Urban design - the intentional shaping of cities for people, and ‘Urban Design’ as a postmodern critique of modernist urbanism
• Urban design as an inter-disciplinary research field with methodologies that cut across approaches and epistemologies
• A Mongrel Discipline
• Urban design is in fact a mongrel discipline that draws its legitimising theories from diverse intellectual roots - straddling these roots to connect silo-based disciplines, an ‘amalgam’, integrative
• Urban design knowledge exists as:
  1. A focused amalgam of core knowledge and practice pragmatically drawn from other fields both practical and intellectual
  2. A distinct and developing field that has reworked and recast borrowed knowledge by: 
     1. Agglomerating it together into a singular and coherent field of knowledge
     2. Generating new knowledge around what is unique to the subject and practices inherent to urban design
• The Power of Research
• A considerable discord exists between those taking a social science perspective and those hailing from design backgrounds
• Large numbers of grand projects have been incorrectly promoted on the basis of their social benefit, when such benefits turned out to be largely illusory
• Both perspectives are incomplete, social science leading to space-lessness, design leading to place-lessness
• Socio-economic potential will always influence space and context should always inform design, social science and design need to be reconciled to move beyond partial views of the territory
• ‘The physical dimension of planning, the space shaping nature of architecture, the socio-economics of the sociologist’, combing the right side of the brain with the left
• Choosing the Right Approach(es)
• Why is research in urban design important?
• Research influences (and is influenced by) what society reflects (or the market) as valuable knowledge
• Urban design questions aren’t rational in nature, being difficult to identify and frame
• ‘Cities are not rocket science, they are more complex than that’
• The processes or urban design are subject to human vagaries, in essence unpredictable and poorly understood
• Even we rationalise, the research only provides a snapshot of a particular place and time that varies according to context, with no clear line to process or product making funding hard to justify
• Designing an obesity pill would deliver tangible benefits, designing a city to encourage exercise and healthy lifestyles is infinitely more complex
• The benefits of urban design research and a better urban environment are huge, the mongrel discipline perhaps needing to emerge from within its traditional contemporaries into a unique and established discipline
• How do we conduct urban design research?
• Four grand families of research methods:
  1. Scientific method, based on logic, systematic and measurable evidence and empirical investigation with reproducible methods
  2. Social science methods, human social phenomena including politics and economics, mixing both qualitative and quantitative methods (positivist and anti-positivist)
  3. Humanities methods, interpretation and critical analysis of phenomena, exploring the context and meaning of theory and it’s interpretations
  4. Design methods, design and research led practice using experimentation (real and imagined) to explore problems, under the premise multiple solutions are possible
• Three fundamental characteristics of research:
  1. Research evidence, primary vs. secondary - generating original or interpreting existing sources of data
  2. Research knowledge, subjective vs. objective - uncovering and examine facts and truths (positivist) or speculative knowledge, relativist and abstract which is never ultimately right or wrong
  3. Research journey, inductive vs deductive - moving from specific to general (including generating theory) or from general to specific, testing theory through gathering evidence
• How should urban design research be used?
• Research should be advancing knowledge in the discipline, generating new information, or recasting and incrementally improving existing understandings.
• Research is for other researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and users of the urban environment, and is equally valid whether informing practice or in academic debate
• Theoretical work will be most powerful if, over time, it informs practice
• Urban design research must communicate with relevance to the real world, with transparent language (both language and illegible graphical representations)
• Urban design is diverse and in this sense there is no normative urbanism or set of principles that apply everywhere
• The Book
• (Interdisciplinary) Meta-approaches to Urban Design Research
  1. Philosophical approaches
     1. Using theory and critique to understand
  2. Process investigations
     1. focus on the normative tools, systems, procedures and networks that shape potential urban design outcomes
  3. Physical explorations
     1. analytical understanding of shape, configuration and growth of space as a physical product of the city, including activity, use, and movement
  4. Propositional experiments
     1. research and pedagogy through design process and creative speculation to reveal solutions to urban problematics
  5. Performance enquiries
     1. direct and indirect investigation of human and stakeholder enquiries, investigating the nature of space-in-use and other performance dimensions

Interpretation:

Summary:

• Introduction
• Proposal of a specific taxonomy of the most salient lines of current urbanistic design work.
• Cities, ostracized by the deployment of functionalist urbanism in the post-war years, are experimenting with an unprecedented level of transformation and rehabilitation.
• Not all urbanism fits within categories, but each has a specific set of methods and instruments which can foster city building.
• Ten Contemporary Approaches
  1. Synthetic gestures
     1. key buildings with urban synergies, big energy to trigger broader urban revitalisation, usually backed by a broad city restructuring plan - example: guggenheim bilbao
  2. Multiplied grounds
     1. the large urban artifact as a driver, transformation of emblematic parts of the city creating new centralities through conversion/redefinition - example: euralille
  3. Tactical manoeuvres
     1. minimum critical mass as a driver, ‘there is almost always something to be improved’ - in low investment contexts - example: malagueria by siza (infrastructural spine)
  4. Reconfigured surfaces
     1. the restructuring of fine grained open space, the aggregation of small scale projects with moderate means, provides a new lease on life without the cost of large restructuring - example: Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam
  5. Piecemeal aggregations
     1. the urban fragment as the intermediate scale (18-25 city block), confronting various briefs where integration of overlap, competing and coalescing demands exist - example: battery park city
  6. Traditional views
     1. the old city brought up to date with functional needs of contemporary life
  7. Recycled territories
     1. large landscapes and decentralisation, transformation and restructuring of large tracts of land where human settlement participates in a broader ecological setting
  8. Core retrofitting
     1. reorganising and reconfiguring historical and traditional fabrics to guarantee their operation, updating infrastructure and overcrowded fabric for contemporary purposes/objectives
  9. Analog compositions
     1. rethinking the masterplan, seeking a ‘project’ orientation with the city seen as open, taking advantage of small and intermediate scales and the developing framework (physical and political) in which small projects can aggregate
  10. Speculative procedures
      1. experimental investigations in urbanism from other theory-based disciplines, formulating new principles and repertoires of innovative value - frequented through competition and in schools of design

Interpretation:

Summary:

• Introduction
• After the second world war, urban design emerged as a separate professional activity in Europe and America.
• The new term was partly in response to the necessity of addressing war damage, while also to assist planning for the impact of the automobile.
• At the time, some saw the new for a new field between architecture and planning, with planners working at a large scale and architects dealing with the single building.
• By 1945 the largest cities containing the world urban population (30% of the 3 Billion global) were located in Europe and a few large American cities, with outliers like Beijing and Tokyo.
• The European metropolis had expanded via industrialisation however many infrastructures at the end of the war lay unused or in ruins.
• European architects dreamt of controlling every facet of great metropolitan centres, urban design in the imperial age a grand urban affair.
• By the beginning of the 21st century the picture had completley changed.
• Over 50% of the world’s population would live in cities, 3 billion urban people, with 33% in informal settlements.
• The location of global population had also shifted, with Asia overtaking many European capitals.
• The form of the city had also changed, the megacity eclipsing the compact metropolis of the 20th century, a dispersed logic of informal and formal developments connect by complex infrastructures.
• Four models or themes are identified to have occured during 60 years following 1945 - the metropolis, megalopolis, the fragmented metropolis, and the megacity/metacity.
• Different urban actors in different periods created different urban models, using the basic elements of enclave, armature and heterotopia.
• Urban Design - An Overview
• Intense urbanisation of the last 60 years has been the accidental by-product of industrialisation producing great wealth and great poverty.
• Oil provided the new energy source for this process, and small petroleum powered engines transformed the lives of the rich and poor, in the city and countryside.
• As the 21st century continues, the cost of dependence on fossil fuel in becoming clear, with climate and global warming threatening megacities built adjacent river estuaries and costal plains.
• Americans led the way in oil-based development, however their use inefficient due to low cost and subsidies. The low energy efficiency has seen American’s consume 10 times as much energy as the global average individual. As cities shift, there is much to learn from Asian economies operate with 1/13th the American energy per capita.
• This shift sees the traditional Eurocentric narrative unworkable with new urban actors entering.
• Urban design innovation meant the rapid transformation of modernist prototypes in hybrid with local climate and culture.
• By the end of the 20th century, old metropolitan cities were importing innovations from their former colonies.
• Varying urban design strategies have emerged as populations shift from Europe to Asia.
• In broad terms China seems to cherish the modernist metropolitan model, with India investing in infrastructure and practicing a less prescriptive, bottom up pattern of development.
• In western cities, increases in oil prices threaten the dispersed spatial logic (suburbs) that has made public transport uneconomical.
• Global urban actors, patterns and models
• Urban actors, and their beliefs, build cities.
• All cities, even randomly looking, are products of beliefs and actors with energy and organisational skills which manifest as chaotic swarming products of individual choice - made in the individuals best interests.
• Cities are about people living together and this requires organisation in managing the affairs of the community and larger city.
• Managing via cybernetics - urban modelling and self organisation.
• Cybernetics is the art and science of managing information flows through sorting and feedback mechanisms.
• Analysis of this data helped designers create complex representations of urban fragments in virtual space, as well as identify patterns in seemingly chaotic informal environments like favelas.
• Urban actors manipulate a limited set of urban elements in building their urban models and cities, making models which work for them in a particular time and place.
• The enclave - a more or less bounded space, the armature - a linear spatial organisation device, and the heterotopia - a specialised enclave which can hold conflicting urban activities in the same place, at the same time (often vertically), and contributing to the overall stability of the city (through it’s capacity to absorb change).
• Urban actors are able to reflect on their models, reorganise elements, and transform models to fit local circumstance and time.
• Global European empires broke down into nation states dominated by the two superpowers of the cold war.
• The Russian urban model focused on the metropolis, with a central empire and satellite cities in form of a miniature clone.
• The American model, the megalopolis, linked linear networks of cities, originally through railway networks and costal plaints, then through the oil fuelled infrastructure and roadways for the automobile.
• European cities and their shrinking empires straddled between models, making hybrids based on the safety net of a welfare state.
• Japan and the ‘Asian tigers created hybrid models with stronger, more centralised governments - the fragmented metropolis.
• Latin American nations developed a characteristic model including non-industrialised informal settlements where new immigrants cold build their own houses within a megacity model.
• The American model proved triumphant by the early 90’s, however the externalities and cost to ecological, financial, and social elements became apparent, with Asian style megacities emerging as an alternative model.
• As global financial institutions emerge as sources of capital, inter city competition intensifies.

• Urban Archipelago’s
• It is tempting to see the four urban design models as 15 year terms in a sequential periods of development.
• After the second world war, a period of reconstruction followed the metropolitan model of Europe’s crumbling imperial system.
• During the cold war, America developed a new megapolitan model based on oil instead of coal, and exported the model to Europe and Asia after 1960 in the golden age, lasting until the early 1970’s.
• The system became unstable as the result of a series of oil shocks, setting in motion the fragmented metropolis model with stable, smaller urban patches financed by global corporations.
• As the global system reached it’s limits inside a financial meltdown, global urban populations shifted to low and middle income Asian style megacities.
• The four models present at once as patches in most cities, forming a network of symbiotic interrelations.
• We can view such fragments as archipelagos, clusters of urban island, with privileged links connecting them.
• In the archipelago model, all models co-exist in constellation which people have the ability to live together amongst their differences.

Interpretation:

Summary:

Emergent Urbanisms

Title: Subject and State

Author details: Julian Raxworthy

Interpretation

Summary:

• Paternalism
• How does the social make it’s way into design?
• Is the state my father? Should they limit my autonomy for my own best interest?
• Can the state speak for the people without consulting them?
• Subjectivity - ‘you’ vs ‘an aggregation of abstract individuals’
• What was once best practice is now highly critiqued - the value system/set is forever shifting
• The right to difference (as opposed to modularity, even in a standardised system) - see Jean Renaudie
• The danger in evidence based design is that it treat the individual as a metricised organism, rather than a thinking/feeling subject
• Subjectivity infers a sense of ownership
• But the state - ‘We know what’s best for you’
• Zone vs Place
• Planning has evolved from a spatial discipline to a social one
• Infrastructure is not benign - it can be used to segregate groups
• Infrastructure is outside the city - therefore it is typically owned/developed by the state (this is changing with PPP’s)
• Infrastructure is reliant on economics and finance for its development
• The state uses the private sector to develop/build infrastructure
• Zoning is not benign - some things you don’t want to live next to
• Project for public spaces and the flexible chair - but it needs someone to manage it (privately owner public space)
• Places need people to manage them - they are not static
• Representation
• Zoning is essentially about separating functions
• Modern ‘bode’ is a blending of strategic zoning (Robert Moses?) and subjective experience (Jane Jacobs)
• The state and the subject
• The state - a governing institution with a responsibility to the subject
• Values - towards the subject, as a responsibility
• Effects - how do we create infrastructure to facilitate values to the subject
• Modality - strategic planning (abstract)
• The subject - you as a subject, you having an experience
• Instruments - mechanisms to catalyse circumstance, creating effects
• Instances - implementation of a desired effect (in a place) to manifest the states values in the subjects experience
• Modality - statutory planning (tactics through land use and development)
• Closing
• Urban design is too focused on activities, and not subjectivites
• Planners are attempting to mitigate the negative impacts of misguided architecture
• Michael Sorkin (Local Code) looks to mediate the state and the subject
• We are too fixated in design as a visual/spatial metaphor - design the rules/mechanisms/text

Do not go to Syracuse, but if you have been there, return as soon as possible to improve our society, as Plato did.

Interpretation:

Summary

Interpretation:

Summary:

• Density and Landscape
• Densities and the openness of landscapes
• Densities relationship with sprawl, relative to three dimensionalitiy
• Coverage isn’t density
• Floor area ratio; relationship between coverage and FAR
• Density is in opposition to ecology; how much green space is left over?
• Metabolism
• Catchment; an area with a watershed boundary
• Topography and water, influence of orientation and aspect
• Ecosystem services
• Regulation → quality
• Supporting → feed into life
• Provisioning → matter
• Cultural → ethics
• The way we cover the surface has big impacts downstream (and in the groundwater) → impervious surfaces, densification has impacts to how much water goes into the system or releases as water vapour
• Urban heat island and the effect of compounding
• You can’t regulate what people plant on private land
• People in the landscape (the more dynamic the longer the occuapation)
• Informality, temporal, being able to move in the landscape
• Renaissance and point zero, everything outside is ‘primitive’
• Static verses dynamic practices
• Bantu people and cattle, emergent in the landscape, a form of temporary territoriality (as opposed to capitalism which accounts for everything and confers ownership, private property et al)
• We treat monumentality like history, and ephemerality doesn't exist
• Khoikhoi were moving temporary dwellings and cattle seasonally
• These people were moving dynamically across the landscape, often to provisioning services (water sources, food)
• Cities of stone (the most basic element)
• Geology is fundamental, materially and for structure
• Inca - reverence to site, protection of natural stone
• Rio - intrusions of granite in geography
• Landscape architecture → approach geology and then catchment to understand landscape
• Stone breaks down into soil... (or dirt)
• Cities of Water (set up from topography)
• Ankor Wat, an ancient broadacre city, possibly lost to climate induced sea level rise
• Amazon jungle → constant moving and reoccupation, planting food gardens and leaving them before returning
• Brisbane floods → adaptation or intervention in planning/real estate (what stops these from moving? our attached to economics and the present)
• Regionalism (a new approach to understand the city and the landscape, larger)
• The greater system a city is tied into → often around catchment/topography
• McHarg layers (Layers/GIS)
• Bedrock/geology is permanant
• Relief
• Geology
• Hydrology (rock and water are inverse)
• Slope
• Soil
• Urban ecology
• Anne Whiston Spirn → understand the city as nature
• The crack between paving; a soil profile
• Richard Forman
• Patch, corridor, matrix → patch dynamics
• Patches of vegetation joined by corridors creating a matrix
• The closer the patches the higher the benefit
• Landscape Urbanism (work with the systems thinking through process, not artifact)
• Ecological functioning as logic setup
• The landscape can’t move because it has been purchased and owned
• Recovering Landscape (James Corner)
• Ecological thinking asks to understand how things intersect
• The stick in the sand → working with the systems of the landscape already (emergent properties from the physics, eg. flocking)
• James Corner shifts water depths to alter biodiversity
• Process, emergence, self-organisation
• STOSS flood protection precedent, how do we store and catch water?

Intepretation

• "Welcome to the new middle ages" - Lewick, p21

Summary

• Umberto Eco believed that many problems of the middle ages have returned in contemporary tmes - a term coined neomedivalism.
• Many thinkers of then 20th and 21st centuries believe that the social, political and economic trends of globalisation can be compared with trends occuring during the middle ages.
• In comparision to prognostics, the use of foresight infers forward vision and a planning more rooted in reality - future actions based on established, visible trends.
• Eco spots signs of neomedivalism in further processes such as the alienation and structural decentralisation of the metropolis -with enclosure of neighborhoods with minorities who reject integration.
• Neomedievalism in economics would assume the integration of ethical considerations in theory, the emergence of neofeudalism and themes of paternalism in job relations. An era of social dyanmics and high financial risk, with more people willing to waiver some freedom and individuality for stability of life.
• Urbanology (Stanislaw Lose) - differing from planning by focusing on the human in urban space, not on the structure of the city, for which human activitiy is only a by-product.
• Neomedievalism is present with modern institutions resembling those from the middle ages.
• Neomedievalism may become a coherent theory of globalisation.
• Nation states are in decline, transforming into network states.
• Cities will strongly benefit from 'thin regional identities' and their potential to integrate network structures.
• Urban policy built on human spontanetity may help reconicle the interests of different groups and create cities with unique, indivudual characterisitcs. 

Interpretation:

Summary:

• Decidim [http://decidim.org], from the Catalan «let’s decide» or “we decide”, is a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, a digital platform, built entirely and collaboratively as free software.
• The platform allows any organization (local city council, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood or cooperative) to create mass processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative design for regulations, urban spaces and election processes.
• By “participatory democracy” we mean that form of “government of the people and by the people” in which people take part as equals or peers (from latin pars, part, and capere, to take).
• By taking part we mean that people take the part of sovereignty of political life that belongs to them. And this should be an equal part for each, democracy is something that is done among peers.
• The term “digital infrastructure” makes reference to a set of tools, resources, data-sets, documents, codes (legal, computer, etc.), interfaces and services that are digitalized or made accessible by digital means.
• All these, when organized as an infrastructure, make possible to deploy a participatory democratic system in any organization (be it a municipality, a cooperative, an association, a union or a community).
• By “free and open” we mean that the project’s goods (the assets of the infrastructure) do no fall under the form of private property, that excludes others from access, usage, copy, modify and re-publish or reuse these resources but, instead, displays all the legal, technical and social means necessary to share them and open them to collaboration.
• the term “public-common’s” indicates that the project is mostly financed and made possible by public institutions and is managed and designed by an open community
• For this infrastructure to be a common’s it is important that these partners organize democratically in relation to the project. In this sense Decidim is a reflexive infrastructure that uses the very infrastructure to democratize itself.
• Specific examples of each of these include: a citizen initiative for directly changing a regulation (Initiative); a general assembly or workers’ council (Assembly); a participatory budgeting, strategic planning, or electoral process (Processes); a referendum or call to vote “Yes” or “No” to change the name of an organization (Consultation).
• So, for example, the various phases of a participatory budgeting process (where members of an organization are called to decide how to spend a budget) can combine components in the following way: at an early phase public meetings can be opened for citizens to analyze different needs classified by districts. In turn these meetings can lead to the design of a survey. The survey results can next be used to define a set of categories for projects to be proposed. The proposal component might then be activated for participants to create and publish their projects as solutions to the identified needs. These proposals can be commented and after two weeks of deliberation the voting component can be activated to select among the projects with a budget-expenditure system. Participants can then be called to a public meeting to evaluate the results and an assessment survey can then be launched for those who could not attend the meeting. Finally, the accountability component can be activated to monitor the degree of execution of the selected projects and people can comment on it.
• What makes Decidim particularly powerful is this combination of components within spaces, which provides an organization with a complete toolkit to easily design and deploy a democratic system adapted to its needs.
• All members and partners of the Decidim project must endorse and follow a “social contract” (https://decidim.org/contract) that defines a set of guiding principles.
  1. Free software and open content:
  2. Transparency, traceability and integrity:
  3. Equal opportunities:
  4. Privacy with verification:
  5. Democratic quality and guarantees: the platform must guarantee the democratic quality, the non-discrimination and equal opportunities for each participant and proposal.
  6. Inclusiveness and multilayerness
• Decidim was born in an institutional environment (that of Barcelona City Council), directly aiming at improving and enhancing the political and administrative impact of participatory democracy in the state (municipalities, local governments, etc.).
• But it also aims at empowering social processes as a platform for massive social coordination for collective action independently of public administrations.
• Corporate digital platforms (Amazon, AirBnB, etc.) are disrupting private services and markets. Decidim comes to fill the gap of public and common’s platforms, providing an alternative to the way in which private platforms coordinate social action (mostly with profit-driven, data extraction and market oriented goals).
• Decidim is more than a technological platform. It has required to assemble a variety of codes, realities and dimensions that go beyond programming code. We define it as a “technopolitical project” where legal, political, institutional, practical, social, educational, communicative, economic and epistemic codes merge together. Ultimately, Decidim is in itself a sort of crossroad of the various dimensions of networked democracy and society, a detailed practical map of their complexities and conflicts.
• the political (focused on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations)
• the technopolitical (focused on how the platform is designed, the mechanisms it embodies, and the way in which it is itself democratically designed)
• the technical (focused on the conditions of production, operation and success of the project: the factory, collaborative mechanisms, licenses, etc.).

Interpretation:

Summary:

• Tools of design governance
• Used to steer public and private actors towards particular policy outcomes
  • Instruments
  • Approaches
  • Actions
  • Formal tools

• Guidance
• Baer (2011, 277) observes that “There are a number of words that mean approximately the same thing” relating to devices to guide human behaviour”
• Using rules as the generic catch-all within which regulations (‘government-issued rules’) and standards (‘a profession’s internally devised rules’) can be located.
• Carmona (2011) places an important limit on what can be included in the category of guidance, because this would imply an element of enforceability that guidance does not possess.
• Fundamental qualities:
  1. The degree of locational specificity
  2. The degree of interpretation the guidance requires 
     1. Performance requirements
     2. Prescriptive criteria
• All the categories fit in with Carmona’s (2011) assertion that guidance tools do not include fixed ‘blueprints’ because the term ‘guidance’ “suggests a sense of direction for, but not an end solution to, a design problem”.
• Four categories of guidance:
  1. Design standards → generic, inflexible
  2. Design coding → focus on form and typology
  3. Design policy → parameters for negotiation and assessment
  4. Design framework → masterplans, urban design frameworks et al

• Incentive
  • Lang (1996, 17) identifies two ways of incentivizing developers to produce particular design / development outcomes, first, through direct financial incentives, and second, through what he calls trade-offs: “Financial incentives reduce the monetary risk to developers of making specific types of development. … Trade-offs tie developments which are uneconomic in the market place to highly lucrative development”.
• The state aided/state encouraged nexus provides a first means to classify incentivization processes as they relate to design.
• Processes of incentivization can also be classified in terms of what they are attempting to incentivize, namely whether they focus on facilitating the process of design and / or development or whether they focus directly on particular clearly defined outcomes such as the provision of public space.
• Four categories of incentive:
  1. Subsidy → granting state aid to projects (treasure)
  2. Direct investment → investment by the state to stimulate develeopment
  3. Process management → streamline the process aiming to incentivise good design
  4. Bonuses → additional benefitis in exchange for public amenity

• Control
• Equally, if incentives are viewed as the ‘carrots’ for good behaviour then control might be seen as the ‘stick’, and as a disincentive to bad behaviours.
• Control processes themselves reflect one of two major types. They are based on fixed legal frameworks with unquestioning administrative decision making as typified by American, European and Japanese zoning systems. Alternatively they are discretionary with a distinction drawn between law and policy, as is the case in British town and country planning; the latter enacted through ‘guiding’ policy and plans, skilled professional interpretation in the light of local circumstances and political decision making (Reade 1987, 11).
• Reflecting their relative strengths and weaknesses, many administrations adopt a mix of the two basic forms of regulation for different purposes. In the UK, for example, planning, conservation and environmental protection are discretionary whilst building control and highways adoption processes are fixed technical processes, open to little interpretation and no recourse to appeal (apart from in the courts).
• Both forms of decision making retain the potential to contribute towards what has been described as a regulatory tyranny (Carmona 2009); the first because of its perceived arbitrary, inconsistent and subjective nature, and the second because of its lack of flexibility or inability to consider non-standard approaches.
• Three categories of regulatory system:
  1. Discretionary → flexible but uncertain
  2. Fixed → certain but inflexible
  3. Crossover → responsive but slower
• Four categories of control:
  1. Developer contributions → non-optional societal price to rectify negative externalities
  2. Adoption → public benefit in the form of development and transference
  3. Development consents → reactive consent to proceed
  4. Warranting → appraisal and permit to ensure safety and legality
• *level of intervention (lesser → greater)
• Informal tools (tools without teeth)
• Because formal processes will always be defined within and limited by the legislative frameworks within which they are created (and by the minds of the politicians and technocrats who draft them), it maybe that informal, non-statutory, means are ultimately required to break through the tried and tested, but all too often unsatisfactory, ways of doing things.
• Returning to Salamon’s (2002, 2) view that the neo-liberal era has brought with it a proliferation in the tools available to government, he also argues that many of these ‘new’ tools share an important characteristic in common: ‘they are highly indirect. They rely heavily on a wide assortment of third parties
• Administration represents the other side of the tools coin in that an administrative infrastructure, appropriate procedures, and the full range of human, financial and skills resources are required to operationalize any sort of tool (Carmona 2016).
• three systems might be characterized as ‘traditional’, ‘indirect’ and the ‘private’ administration of design.

• Evidence
• gathering an evidence-base about design and design process as a means to: support arguments about the importance of design; underpin advice about what works and what does not; and to monitor progress towards particular policy objectives or to gauge the state of the built environment.
• Research → elucidate the processes and influences shaping the built environment
• Audit → understanding place, may precede or occur in-situ (ie. the state of ‘placemaking’)

• Knowledge
• Research underpins the range of knowledge tools, the main purpose of which is to spread knowledge about the nature of good design, good and poor development practices, and why it matters.
• In the absence of formal intervention and / or delivery powers, it was logical to seek to influence those who did have such powers, and the most straightforward way to attempt to do this was through generating and disseminating knowledge that would shape their practices.
• Promotion
• advocacy role, helping to advance particular normative design and design process aspirations based on evidence or practical experience.
• Instead of waiting for organizations and individuals to seek out knowledge, these tools take the knowledge to them, seeking to package key messages in a manner that engages attention and wins over hearts and minds to the importance of good design.
• Evaluation
• tools have the potential to shape particular outcomes rather than just the decision-making environment.
• tools through which judgements are made about the quality of design by a party external to, and therefore detached from, the design process. This brings us up against a key problematic ‒ the extent to which it is possible, or not, to systemize such evaluation
• Indicators → seek to measure and represent aspects of performance
• Design review (informal) → practice outside of statutory frameworks, evaluation through impartial expert opinion
• Certification → recognition of status and benchmarking
• Competitions → conceptual and project, raising standards and rarely mandated

• Assistance
• processes are often encouraged by the relevant authorities in order to try and ensure first, a better outcome, second, a more efficient processing of the formal application for consent once it is made, and third to help develop a more trusting and collaborative relationship between applicant and authority (xxi).
• Beyond these ad hoc and essentially reactive processes, more proactive opportunities exist to engage directly in projects or to otherwise shape the decision-making environment within which design occurs.
• Financial assistance → transference of resources
• Enabling → directed assistance, engaging in an educational manner for legacy

• Community Participation
• participation is not singled out as a tool in its own right, but is instead treated as an activity underpinning others;
• guidance → to improve content, unanimity, avoid discord, improve outcomes
• control → beyond consultation into pre-consent processes
• evidence → understanding place through revealing the aspirations and preoccupations of communities
• knowledge → targeted education
• assistance → enabling activities

• Toolbox
• The low levels of public engagement with many place-focused regulatory processes is in part explained by this communications gap (until and unless individuals perceive themselves to be directly impacted; Hester 1999).
• Failing to utilize (all the tools) them more fully means that those who are responsible for shaping the quality of the built environment are typically doing so with one hand tied behind their back, particularly when it comes to shaping the all-important decision-making environment within which project and place-specific design decisions occur.

Commentary:

Summary:

• Capitalism, particulary neoliberal capitalism, form a ‘perverse ideology’
  • Urban Aporia’s
  • The FIRE paradigm → finance, investment, real estate (Josep Acebillo)
• Tangible or intangible surplus generation?
• “Urban business disguised as urbanity, the result of a perverse ideological system”
  • “Humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors. In a resource rich environment, we coordinate in groups, corporations and nations, to maximize financial surplus, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon. At global scales, the emergent result of this combination is a mindless, energy hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism.” (Nate Hagens)
• “In making the city man has remade himself”
• Individual v Collectivist → consumerism and identity
• “The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption”.
• Urbanism as proxy hegemony
• “An uneasy alliance between state powers and financial institutions lead to neoliberal capitalism - class power protected at the expense of the working class, their standard of living, while the market is deregulated to do it’s work”.
• The property market absorbed a great deal of surplus capital directly through new construction.
• The green new deal the next forefront or extraction?
• Astonishingly global integration of financial markets that use their flexibility to debt-finance urban projects.
• “New urbanisation requires new financial institutions and arrangement to organise the credit required to sustain it”.
• “Semi periphery metropolitan tract housing with easy credit → who then faced escalating commuting costs with rising oil prices and soaring mortgage payments as market-interest rates kicked in”
• “Quality of urban life has become a commodity for those with money”
• “Pacification by cappuccino”
• “This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism can become the template for human personality socialisation”
• “We increasingly live in divided, fragmented, and conflict-prone cities”
• “Under these conditions, a coherent urban politic, already threatened by the individualistic neoliberal ethic”.
• “Surplus absorption, through urban transformation (renewal), restructuring through ‘creative destruction’. This nearly always has a class dimension”.
• “A process of displacement and dispossession lie at the core of the urban process under capitalism”.
• As Leonard Cohen on sand, “what lets the light in” → what does the right to the city demand? Greater democratic control over the production and use of the surplus - over the deployment of the surplus through urbanisation.
• The whole neoliberal project has been oriented towards privatisation of control over the surplus.
• Michael Bloomberg - Building like Moses with Jane Jacobs in Mind
• “One step towards unification of the struggles - focus where the rich creatively destroy the poor, and focus on their right to change the world, to change their life”.