Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> <italic>Urban design names an act of authorship, yet its theory has progressively displaced the designer — from the critique of master planning through assemblage thinking and actor-network theory to accounts of urban self-organisation. This movement has enriched the field’s grasp of emergence while weakening its capacity to assign authorship or accountability. This paper proposes a correction: authorship is distributed but not flat. Urban form is produced by a configuration of agents — residents, capital, the state, land, materials, climate — whose weights differ, and accountability follows weight. Re-reading an existing dataset of informal morphogenesis, the paper shows that what most divides them is not their legal status but the concentration of authorship. It proposes a framework for distinguishing configurations, and argues that pluralising urban design theory means pluralising not only values but the structures of agency and accountability. It offers a diagnostic vocabulary rather than a universal model of urban value.</italic> </p>