DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-176768
title: Governance and urban design: Omaha by design

description: Omaha By Design (OBD) began as an idea for improving the built environment of Omaha, and evolved into a local corporate-sector-led initiative. OBD collaborated with the city governance, the real estate sector, and neighborhoods for creating a citywide urban design plan and corresponding codes. This dissertation studies the process of the OBD plan from urban governance and political economic perspectives and employs theoretical concepts of urban regimes, collaborative governance, and citizen participation to inform urban design literature. During this study, it became apparent that these theoretical concepts were not entirely effective in explaining several dimensions of the OBD process, leading to secondary insights for these concepts. ❧ The scholarship on urban design plans typically overlooks the process dimension. Rather, the literature comprises of comparative studies of plans, content analysis of form controls and urban design guidance systems, and case studies of completed projects. By focusing on the process, this study examines how urban design visions are transformed, contents of the codes are altered, and initial intents of the plans are modified by the nature of collaboration and participation among various regimes, interest groups, and institutional and political actors. ❧ The primary research question of this study is: How does governance dimension explain the process of an urban design plan and its implementation? The secondary but related questions are: (1) How do recent developments of collaborative governance and participatory planning revise the notion of urban regimes? (2) How does this revised notion of urban regimes contribute to understanding the production of urban form? This study employs a single case study based qualitative framework of data collection and analysis. Three types of secondary cases about collaboration, private sector participation, and urban design plan process, supplement the primary case to augment the validity and reliability of the findings. ❧ Overall, the OBD initiative is found successful, because its collaborative model for an urban design plan united stakeholders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors for the first time, generated awareness, and led citizens of Omaha to realize their role in shaping urban design and form issues for the community. The drawbacks in the OBD process include: weaknesses in the vision and design of the plan, greater focus on the planning but not enough on implementation, a lack of specificity and rigor in the formulation of the codes, and the promoters of the plan relenting to the demands of the interest groups. ❧ The findings reveal that “internal” and “external” aspects of governance influence the realization of an ideal urban design vision into corresponding codes. These “internal” dimensions are: (1) multi-faceted stakeholders; (2) nature of the urban design vision; (3) absence of meaningful participation of the community; (3) problems in implementation arising from consultants conveying a limited knowledge about institutional complexities, their short-term focus, and a lack of concern on relating final codes with the overall vision. The “external” dimensions are: (1) tensions among local expectations and global trends of retail urban forms; (2) demands of local communities for context-specific urban forms; (3) lack of variety and flexibility in retail prototypes; and (4) unfamiliarity of the plan’s promoters in collaborating with diverse stakeholders. ❧ The findings enhance the scholarship on urban regimes by demonstrating that regime theory neglects the roles of multiple levels of governing institutions, stakeholder collaboration and citizen participation. Furthermore, collaboration for an urban design initiative differs significantly from other cross-sector collaborations, and the ideals of citizen participation still remain at a nascent stage in developing urban design plans.