Design Governance, Austerity and the Public Interest: Planning and the Delivery of ‘Well-Designed Places’ in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland

Abstract

This paper considers how planning authorities can achieve urban design ambitions in the context of deepening neoliberalism and fiscal austerity. Based upon a case study of West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, the paper reveals the innovative steps taken by the local authority to introduce new design governance tools in the face of significant resource constraints. The paper critically examines the role that the private sector plays in the governance of design and argues for a reconceptualisation of design governance that more rigorously attends to the challenge of delivering well-designed places in the public interest.

Identification of Urban Functional Areas and Governance Measures Based on Point of Interest Data: A Case Study of the Shenyang Railway Station Area in Shenyang City

“…In view of the problems in the existing studies on urban function identification, including using a scale that is at an inappropriate macro-level, poor accuracy of identification, and the complications that arise in directly applying the same research results to different cities, this study attempts to address the issue at the district level and utilise the spatial adjacent relations, to connect the POIs with the plots where the buildings are located, realise the rapid identification of the land use functions of urban districts, identify and evaluate the functional clustering of the urban built environment, and summarise the characteristic rules of the land use planning in the high-speed railway station districts by examining real-life cases. Compared with the traditional methods, this study makes improvements in the following areas: (1) examines the issue with spatial adjacent relations of the POIs, to lower the influences of the excessive clustering of POI data on the identification of plot functions, in order to provide a more accurate identification; (2) eliminates the subjective design of the bandwidth parameters and weighting parameters in traditional POI kernel density studies, so that the research results can be directly applied to other urban designs; (3) considers the actual conditions in zones with mixed functions, as well as the zoning management and control of the units to be regenerated, and takes into account the contradictions and conflicts between historical elements and modern elements, physical elements and industrial format elements, and functional elements and structural elements in an integrated manner, so that the study can provide suggestions to the upper-level planning of the regeneration management of the study district [38][39][40][41][42].…”

Negotiating Vertical Urbanization at the Public–Private Nexus: On the Institutional Embeddedness of Planning Committees

“…This increase has been attributed to a variety of circumstances. Richardson and White (2021), for example, see the rise of design review panels as a result of austerity and the shrinking of public sector planning departments in the UK. Williams (2014, p. 444), on the case of Australia, connects their rising prominence to a "lack of confidence by councils and state government in the quality of advice provided by council staff."…”