Ginza, a major commercial downtown, has a design council which enables a local association of business owners, while not having strong legal/institutional basis, to hold pre-negotiations with developers in order to exercise design control. To answer a question of whether such negotiations could have a real impact over developments, this paper aims to clarify the actual operations of Ginza Design Council and found out that they are in fact influential. The fact that there exists a community in Ginza that represents a kind of pre-modern sense of “public” seems to account for such GDC influence. We can also assume that the Design Rules specifically created for Ginza have made the negotiations more effective.