This blog explores the essential nature of design review as a peer review process with a long history and a present that has seen the practice grow and grow.  During this history. practices have evolved and many have moved from a top-down critique that can be likened to a cold shower, to a more supportive two-way engagement, more like a warm bath.  Rather than a regulatory gateway through which projects must pass, this form of design review represents a constructive and engaging informal improvement tool, focused on adding value to developments by helping to broaden discussions as well as positively challenging the design / development team.  Drawing on international examples, I argue that cold showers are sometimes good for us, but warm baths are likely to be more beneficial over the long run.  

Past

As a tool of design governance, design review has a long history.  As mentioned before in these blogs, the earliest evidence I have found was of the wonderfully named ‘Committee of Taste’, set up in 1802 in England.  Its official name was the Committee for the Inspection of Models for National Monuments, but under the chairmanship of Charles Long (first Baron Farnborough), it quickly became known as the Committee of Taste, perhaps reflecting its membership which was described at the time as seven leading “connoisseurs and collectors of British paintings and classical antiquities”.  

The committee was initially established to supervise the erection of suitable monuments to the “heroes of the Napoleonic wars”, a focus on the design and positioning of monuments that also underpinned the founding in 1910 of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington DC, America’s first and longest surviving design review panel, and, in 1924, of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, England’s first country-wide panel.  While the Committee of Taste only operated until the mid-1820s, it established the principle of a peer review process for the design of built environment projects and, in essence, that is what design review remains today.  

In one form or another and under many different labels, including quality review, place review, design surgeries, aesthetic control, design advisory boards, design commissions, building committees, project meetings, quality chambers, and spatial quality teams, design review has spread around the globe.  In a few countries, design review has become ubiquitous.  In the Netherlands, for example, design review has been a constant presence since 1898 when municipalities were first empowered to establish ‘Aesthetic Control Committees’.  Today, all 355 municipalities in the country have a committee with the formal power to prevent building permits being issued if the design is not deemed suitable.

In most countries, including Australia, the USA and the UK, design review practices followed local political choices and developed in a more haphazard and intermittent manner.  In these places some locations are covered by panels and others are not.  They have also tended to be more informal in nature, with a status reflected in an advisory rather than a regulatory purpose.  In Europe’s German speaking countries, for example, design advisory boards developed as intermediaries between the interests of owners and the public in many larger towns and cities, including in Innsbruck.  There, the design advisory board assesses the quality of projects submitted against specified criteria and offers advice to the city council which they have the discretion to follow, or not.

Typically, panels are appointed by municipalities and consist of design and other built environment professionals who conduct their work for the public sector without a charge being levied on those being reviewed.  In England, however, following the 2011 demise of the influential Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), along with its national design review panel and funding for regional offshoots, design review was opened to the market as a chargeable service.  After a rocky start, this marketisation eventually led to a range of market and not-for-profit organisations offering their services to municipalities who can either employ a private provider to set up and run a dedicated panel, or can choose to set up one themselves, in-house.  Many chose not to conduct or commission design review at all.

In whatever form it is conducted, processes of design review have long been the subject of criticism, notable amongst them being Brenda Case Scheer’s withering critique of American design review.  She concluded that such process potentially set professionals against another, subject the work of experienced designers to demeaning scrutiny by non-designers, carry unacceptable costs, not least those associated with re-designing to ‘improve’ design outcomes or to deliver more expensive design solutions, are unduly secretive, often being conducted behind closed doors without community input, and are arbitrary and subjective in their deliberations.  Likewise, the London-based national panel of CABE was widely criticised, notably for being elitist, biassed (against traditional design), overbearing, insensitive, and inconsistent in its deliberations.  Others maintained that it was never nearly forceful enough in how it assessed design quality.  Whatever the case, arguably it was the gradual build-up of resentment amongst professionals – particularly architects whose projects had not fared well at CABE’s design reviews – that sowed the seeds of the organisation’s eventual downfall.

Present

This might seem a curious response from a profession raised on the foundation of the architectural crit, with studios in universities around the world routinely building up and demolishing students of architecture in front of their peers (as a student I remember the fear of the crit, often following an ‘all-nighter’, all too well!).  This is the very essence of what we can call a ‘cold shower’ approach to design review – a top-down, one-way shock to the system, often featuring a power-imbalance against those being reviewed.  

Clearly no one likes being criticised, particularly if that is a public process, but the extent to which design review is either a fully open process (rare in my experience) or the results are openly disclosed (as CABE’s ‘letters’ were), varies significantly, along with almost every aspect of the process.  Thus panels range in: i) their focus, some concentrating on specific projects and places and others on whole municipalities; ii) their administration, whether as an integral part of larger regulatory processes or separated from them; iii) their size and the range of expertise of panel members; iv) their status, including the discretion given to project promoters to appear or not; and, perhaps most importantly, v) in the degree to which the advice is taken on board by both developers and regulators.

As instruments of urban design governance, design review falls into a larger category of what I have termed ‘Rating tools’.  Rating tools allow judgments to be made about the quality of design in a systematic and structured manner, usually by parties such as other professionals or community groups, that are external to, and therefore independent from, the design / development process being evaluated.  They enable the public sector to systemise these judgements and make assessments about design quality in ways that are (hopefully) robust.  

This can be done in two ways.  First, formative evaluations, feeding into and informing the design process, and second, summative, evaluating the design quality of already fully formed development propositions.  Depending on when and how it is conducted in relation to regulatory processes, design review can operate in both these ways, although evidence from London suggests that formative design review has the potential to deliver the greatest improvements in design quality as engaging earlier in the development process helps to build a local culture of design quality that empowers designers to strive for better design, and delivers a more certain, informed and confident environment for decision-making.  

For John Punter, such processes have the potential to extend the remit of design review beyond a narrow regulatory function, and to thereby address some of the critiques.  Panels such as those created in Auckland and Vancouver have demonstrated the potential of such an extended remit.  In both cities, design review has been used to provide early and constructive advice to developers on specific development proposals; to advise their respective cities on policy and guidance frameworks; and generally to champion good design across the professional establishment and community at large.  In both these cases, the link between the design review function and formal regulatory processes is less clear cut, with design review being used more as a formative critique as opposed to a summative evaluation immediately prior to the final regulatory gateway decision, as occurs in most American panels.

This informal and formative design review works by lending project teams (temporarily) but also repeatedly over the course of designing a large development project, the skills and wisdom of experienced practitioners who are able to advise on the design of specific identified development projects from their independent and dispassionate perspective.  In doing so, the aim should be to constructively challenge development teams by drawing from a breadth and depth of experience that may not be available to the project team or within the municipality, including expertise in more specialist areas such as inclusion, resilience, ecology, or carbon reduction.  Design review, of this type can be characterised as a ‘warm bath’ approach – a supportive, two-way engagement, featuring a constructive conversation between those reviewing and those being reviewed.  Rather than a gateway through which projects pass, this form of design review is an improvement tool, focused on adding value to developments by helping to broaden discussions by positively challenging the design / development team.  It may also have a gateway role, ensuring projects meet defined standards, but this, I would suggest, should not be its primary purpose.

The development of Spatial Quality Teams (Q-teams) in the Netherlands, offers an example of this more hands-on and supportive style.  Q-teams build on the more reactive work of the long-established Aesthetic Control Committees to provide proactive advice about enhancing the spatial quality of buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, landscapes and regions.  They do not design projects, but are instead set up by local, provincial, or national authorities as multidisciplinary teams of experts to provide independent advice on large scale development areas, often advising individual projects on their contribution to the quality of the larger place and sometimes guiding the establishment of associated spatial policy frameworks.  Typically, this means providing knowledge and design capacity to authorities at the early stages of a planning and design processes.  

In England, many panels have learned from the downfall of CABE and have adopted the ‘warm bath’ approach.  This, and the associated funding mechanism (developers now pay) means that, against early expectations, this marketisation of urban design governance has led to an increased take up of design review.  And correlating the design quality of 142 housing-led development projects across the country with processes of delivery revealed that good design quality is four times more likely to be associated with the use of design review than poor quality design.  In other words, the post-CABE landscape of design review has had an impact on positively shaping better design outcomes and is doing so more widely and for more developments than ever before.

There is, of course, a downside.  Every panel managed externally by a private or third sector partner implies the removal of that capacity and the associated resources from the public sector and into an external consultancy.  In other words, the potential to use the income from the marketisation of design review to build internal design capacity within local authorities is effectively being lost.  So, instead of design review becoming the cornerstone of an enhanced public sector design capability, it is often a standalone, isolated and specialist activity, run in a fairly regimented and standardised manner, with some design review service providers running twenty or more local authority panels.  One provider has even systemised their service to such a degree that bookings can be made online for anywhere in UK with panels put together on an impromptu basis, seemingly without prior connection to the place.  Such practices are reminiscent of the somewhat detached national panel once operated by CABE, but whether it is a return to a full ‘cold shower’ is doubtful given the lack of gravitas enjoyed by such ad hoc arrangements.

Future

Whether the critiques of design review are accepted, or not, design review clearly leads to judgements – good or bad – about design propositions, and by implication also passes judgements on the performance of the teams responsible for them.  If conduced in an unduly top-down, detached, and fleeting manner, design review can be likened to a cold shower: giving a shock to the system, perhaps with some benefits, but for most of us representing something to be endured, got through as quickly as possible and avoided wherever possible in the future.  Conversely, for design review that is constructive, engaging, and part of an ongoing programme of support, the impact may be more like a warm bath, encouraging recipients to stick around and participate in a process of positive and perhaps profound change leading to real benefits under the guidance of a critical friend.

Of course some people like cold showers and eschew warm baths, and indeed sometimes it might be better to simply say “no, start again”, rather than engaging in a process of constructive engagement.  There is also the question of internal resources within the public sector that will influence what is the right approach to take in different circumstances.  A local authority with a well-resourced internal design team, for example, may require less input from an external panel, but will still value the final gateway review to confirm or perhaps challenge their judgement while helping to ensure that design quality remains an important and visible consideration in all development-related decision-making.  A local authority without such a team will benefit from input from an external panel more regularly throughout the design / development process.

John Punter concluded an international review of design review practices by noting that “Each design review system will have its own priorities which will be strongly influenced by long-standing cultural conditions, the local politics of the development process, the perceived design failings of contemporary development, and particularly the sheer power of the market”.  Whether as a formal or informal tool, design review has an important role to play in the smart governance of design, with panels not only playing a vital role in critiquing and improving design projects, but also playing important ancillary roles as mediator, facilitator, professional support group, and educator. 

Critically, however, design review should always be seen as just one tool within a larger investment in the governance of design by the public sector.  This should include, establishing high design aspirations, consistently seeking high standards (including, but not limited to, design review), employing appropriately skilled urban designers within the public sector to prepare proactive guidance and negotiate enhanced design outcomes, and untimely nurturing a local culture of design quality.  If, conversely, design review is seen as another silo in a fragmented network of ever smaller and more specialist silos, then it is unlikely that the necessary integrated thinking will be nurtured in order to deliver long term ‘place value’.

Returning to the Committee for Taste.  Interestingly, this was established by the UK Treasury, not an arm of government that in most countries (including the UK) is typically troubled by such matters.  It demonstrated a concern for value beyond price that is all too rare today.  As well as reviewing projects, the Committee for Taste ran competitions, exhibited designs, awarded commissions, and supervised the erection of monuments, even later branching out to supervise the repair of key public buildings.  In doing so, in an early demonstration of a warm bath over a cold shower, the committee demonstrated that one tool is never enough, and that a reliance on design review will only take you so far.  Then, as now, design review represents a good place to start.   

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona