Unjust by design? Problematising ‘good’ design and evaluating the justice impacts of urban design governance

Abstract

Urban Design is often promoted as a means of creating more inclusive built environments, but efforts by public authorities to raise design standards in new developments can produce outcomes that are exclusionary and unjust. Tools such as design controls and review panels have been found to discriminate against minority groups, to raise development costs, catalyse gentrification, and cause displacements and evictions. A key challenge for public authorities is thus to reconcile the pursuit of high-quality urban design with justice considerations. Addressing this challenge, this paper makes three contributions. First, it problematises the way that ‘good’ design is currently pursued through planning systems, exposing its exclusionary potential. Second, it introduces a tool for assessing public authority design interventions from a justice perspective. Third, it uses this tool as part of a critical analysis of design guides and codes in England in 2024. Through this analysis, the authors highlight numerous ways in which existing design guides and codes are failing to support urban design justice. These include promoting characteristics that can have exclusionary effects, failing to acknowledge the drawbacks of ‘good’ design, ignoring existing forms of injustice, enabling tokenistic public participation, and failing to recognise user needs and preferences. Our analysis shows, overall, that support for urban design justice in England is largely rhetorical, and that unjust outcomes are likely where new developments meet policy requirements. The paper finishes by calling for public authorities to recognise the justice implications of their design interventions, including through what we term ‘just good enough’ approaches.