Context sensitive design policy

When should the public intervene in design decisions?

As much as necessary but as little as possible

Before the twentieth century, few governments would have regulated such matters as our Australian's desire for a polished steel church in a eucalyptus forest. His dream would have been regarded as a private matter, like the decoration of his bedroom. Wordsworth, the romantic poet, was content 'to utter a regret' about undesirable development in the English Lake District. Beside Windemere, he disliked the embankment of Belle Isle for an Italian Villa, the larch plantation which he saw as a 'vegetable manufactory' and 'whole acres of artificial shurbbery and exotic trees among rocks and dashing torrents, with their own wild wood in sight - where we have the whole contents of the nurseryman's catalogue jumbled together - colour at war with colour and form with form' (Wordsworth, 1835:72). Today, many people feel that merely 'to utter a regret' is pusillanimous. Now, it is often claimed that the world must be controlled because it is a single complex 'system'. Sceptics may be reminded of the arguments used in former times by ingenious theologians, anxious to prove the existence of God. William Paley, for example, argued that since a watch could not be made without a watchmaker, the world could not have been made without the prior existence of a God (Paley 1970 edn). Subsequent generations, optimistic of the good which humans might achieve through the application of reason to public policy, came to believe that governments, and planners, should assume a watchmaker's role in human society: by organising education, spreading enlightenment and making society function more like a pocket watch. Planners came to believe that the inter-connectedness of the environment proved the need for a planning profession to control the environment. Is there a happy medium between 'no intervention' and 'maximum intervention'? My own view is that when a development project will have a significant impact on a public good, it is a matter of public policy. Otherwise, like the Australian's bedroom, it is matter for private taste. The aim should be to intervene 'as little as possible but as much as necessary'.