Carmona’s decisive contribution is to define design governance as state-sanctioned intervention in the means and processes through which the built environment is designed in the public interest. This formulation relocates urban design from the production of form to the governance of conditions under which form is produced. The paper develops the field by asking why public authorities intervene, what design governance consists of, and how it operates across formal and informal practices. Its conceptual operation is taxonomic but not merely classificatory: by distinguishing recurring motivations, mechanisms and controversies, Carmona establishes design governance as a distinct analytical domain between design practice, planning regulation and public policy. The iconic idea is that quality can be governed indirectly through procedures, incentives, knowledge, review and institutional capacity, rather than solely through prescriptive control. The wider bridge is to policy-instrument theory and governmentality, where public power is exercised through calibrated steering, institutional environments and distributed forms of expertise.
URBANISM MEETS ART