ABSTRACT
The often quoted adage that the camel is an animal designed by committee is clearly a poor description for this beast. Contrary to such a homocentric view, the Camel is a creature of elegant design, superbly adapted through evolutionary time to its environment, and capable of travelling across barren sands at high speed for weeks on end without food or water. It can truly be called the "ship of the desert". If the basic objective of design review is to ensure that same elegance and sense of fit - those qualities that make for livable urban environments with an identifiable sense of place- then in this author's experience of numerous government and municipal design review processes, the opposite could be said to be true.
