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This paper investigates the formal instruments of design governance and the urban design decision-making environment in Chinese cities. It identifies Shenzhen, Shanghai and Nanjing as three cities pioneering in design-led planning in China and critically evaluates their approaches using a series of 'best practice' principles for design review and development management. The findings are based on 20 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, a review of their design portfolios, and an analysis of urban design policies and plans. The paper identifies the progress made with design governance in the three 'pioneer' cities as well as the challenges associated with adopting more design-sensitive planning practice. It concludes with four recommendations for Chinese cities. These focus on foregrounding sense of place in city-wide urban design visions, raising the quality of design guidance and codes, more effectively coordinating regulations produced by different government departments and agencies, and widening opportunities for public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the governance of urban design on Toronto's waterfront. It examines the formation, mandate and powers of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) – now branded Waterfront Toronto – and critically evaluates the urban design policies, tools and mechanisms that have been put in place to support waterfront redevelopment and pursue a goal of ‘design excellence’ since 1999. The paper traces the key decisions that led to the creation of the TWRC by the federal, provincial and municipal governments and details the ambitious planning and design vision that emerged for the waterfront, but also argues that the TWRC was awarded a limited institutional mandate to fulfil its aims and objectives. The latter sections of the paper describe how a series of design-sensitive tools and mechanisms were introduced alongside the statutory planning framework for the waterfront to counter the governance and financial challenges faced by the Corporation. The paper contends that the Corporation is currently overseeing a broadly positive redevelopment programme that has been able to deliver a high quality public realm on the waterfront and facilitate design-led real estate development. An innovative public engagement strategy has been coupled with neighbourhood ‘precinct’ planning and design peer review to achieve these outcomes. It is argued that these positive shifts have begun to counter the long history of faltering post-industrial development and ‘jurisdictional gridlock’ that has plagued Toronto's waterfront since the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reassesses John Punter's ‘Best Practice Principles for Design Review and Development Management’ that were published in this journal in 2007. Placing a focused lens on British and North American practice, the paper argues that design control and review has been profoundly reshaped since 2007 by three contributing factors: the challenges associated with climate change, the growing role that communities can play in local decision making, and the impacts of the global economic crisis upon public sector finances and property development. In light of these trends, the paper uses a review of recent literature and design practices to argue for a series of amendments to the best practice principles. These focus on: (1) the potential for design control and review to be more fully informed by ecological design theory and practice; (2) the need for more rigorous multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design decision-making process; and (3) the opportunity for urban designers to become more competent ‘market actors’ with the necessary abilities to confidently shape property development decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Design competitions are often used to select design teams for high profile development projects, yet have received scant attention in the literature. Seeking to redress this imbalance, this paper presents a competition model that was employed on Toronto’s waterfront in 2006 for a large public realm project and describes how it was structured around an iterative public consultation process. Although subject to a number of implementation delays, the competition sponsors built a constituency of support for the redevelopment project by engaging lay people in the decision-making process. The paper argues that the competition struck a balance between lay input and professional knowledge and contends that future research efforts should continue to explore means by which public participation can be integrated into design competitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Design students are increasingly seeking precedent information through web-based digital archives of design cases. Little is known, however, about the use, relative merits or opportunities of digital cases as a knowledge source for design students. This paper uses a study of web-based urban design reference tools to examine new opportunities for using precedents in urban design. The research includes focus groups, content analysis of student work and an auto-ethnography by one of the authors to examine student use of the reference tools in 3 urban design studios in planning and landscape architecture. Students used 3-D digital models of precedents to review, replicate, revise, reshape and recreate elements of urban design in an environment of accelerated learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]