In 1967, the National Commission on Urban Problems released a report answering President Lyndon Johnson's request for information regarding the problems of housing, crime, and unrest in the nation's cities. Chaired by Senator Paul Douglas, the report was a mixture of discourses including bureaucratic language, technical information about construction information, architectural discourse, and resident testimony. Historians have studied the constructions of race in the Kerner Report, also commissioned by Johnson, seeking an explanation for urban riots over racial injustice but by comparison, the so-called Douglas Report on Urban Problems is largely unexamined. The Douglas Report demonstrates provides a valuable example of government discourse about architectural knowledge and the impact of the urban environment on equality and the health of a society. In particular, the contribution of four architects reveals the strengths and weaknesses of design discourse as it participated in the national conversation about equity and the nation's urban environments.

In his account of the bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas argued that private citizens were able to develop a substantive check on the power of the state by creating a public discourse, mediated through print and through conversations in coffee shops. More recently, political theorist Nancy Fraser has developed a critique of Habermas that emphasizes the need to adapt his idea of the public sphere to "limits of actually existing democracy". Instead of a small community of gentlemen citizens, public discourse in mass democracies must bridge differences of gender, class and race as well as differences of specialized knowledge. Fraser argues analyzed the way that such large, inclusive political systems contain not a single public sphere but an aggregate, a "multiplicity of publics", composed of: marginalized counter publics, 'weak' publics who are able to speak but not act, and expert counter publics whose speech is substantially colored by the "rhetorical lens" of their institutions. In order for a public discourse to develop among such a complex and differentiated public, the medium of communication must similarly be complex. Indeed, modern mass democracies employ media--such as radio, newspapers, television, Ttwitter, Ffacebook, Google news, and other hybrid forms of communication--which vary in their degree of 'publicnessity', both in the sense of being accessible to all citizens and in the sense of addressing questions which concern everyone. The size and complexity of these media result in a million small distortions and fragmentations in the transmission of any single utterance, presenting a challenge to the construction of a unified public discourse. Amidst this fragmentation, Presidential Commissions have the potential to overcome these particularities and foster a truly public conversation about an urgent problem of shared concern if they can overcome the complexities of their production, release, and manage the accumulation of information necessary to expert discourse.