Introduction

Design regulation, and the systems of review and control that implement them, constitute a complex and controversial area of planning practice, but an area of increasing importance in city, suburbs, towns and villages throughout the developed world. There is increasing recognition of the need to find more effective means of delivering development of a quality that respects the character of the locality and is environmentally sustainable. There is widespread acknowledgement that many of the current systems of regulation are ineffective, unfair, exclusionary, undemocratic and visually illiterate. In a number of countries regulations are seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution to design quality, because they straitjacket designers and stifle innovation and imagination, encouraging only the safe and mediocre.

There are longstanding dissatisfactions with modernist architecture and planning, with the international style and its way of designing urban space, with largescale redevelopment and urban renewal, with corporate franchise design and standardised building forms. There are perhaps deeper dissatisfactions with the loss of local landmarks, with reduced access to the natural world, with the erosion of urban fabric perpetrated by the car, and with the consequent decline in air and environmental quality. There is also a growing dissatisfaction with the fake, the pastiche, the façadist, the gentrified and the ‘themed’ landscapes that are commercial responses to the failures of modernist architecture and town planning and, in part at least, a product of more sophisticated design controls.