“tactical urbanism: an evolutionary approach?”

“Tactical urbanism: an evolutionary approach?”

Paulo Silva | university of Aveiro | department of social, political and territorial sciences

[email protected]

12th AESOP planning and complexity meeting | 16/17th january 2014 | manchester school of architecture

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

(In brief)

• Spatial planning and evolution

• Urban design – uncertainty or moving on?

• Tactical urbanism, an evolutionary approach?

Manchester school of architecture, 16th / 17th january 2014 2

Spatial planning and urban design

• An official recognition in diferent time frames

• A co-evolutionary process (Assche, et al, 2013)

• An apparent contradiction (urban design as an autonomous discipline and at the same time mixed up with spatial planning)

• Having importante outcomes on urban form

and

• The “forbidness” of talking about urban form (Secchi, 2003)!


An evolutionary approach

• The complexity of contemporary urban territories

• Complexity theories as a way to deal with contemporary urban territories

• The lack of new answers from “formal” ways of planning

• How much can innovation in urban design be related with complexity theories?


Spatial planning, urban design and evolution

• Cities are not objects (which are “simple”) and are not organisms (which we know how they evolve)

• Cities evolve

• As opposed to objects (which are replaced when improvement happens), cities adapt as a result of uneven transformation of its systems

• Adapting has its limits, from a certain extent on cities might be abandonned and disappear


Has been evolution out of the way we think cities? Not really, but:

• uncertainty has being seen as a problem which spatial planning and urban have been trying to fix

• If we look as cities as objects or organisms uncertainty can be related with malfunctions

Nevertheless,

• The approach based on space, time and civics (Marshall, 2009)


City scale and the creationist, developmental and evolutionary paradigms 3 planning paradigms for 3 scales?

• Creationist | street level

• Creationist / Developmental | urban project level

• Evolutionary | city level


Cities have been (also) the result of unplanned decisions from the plan´s point of view

• Modernist functional segregation | reaction to forced changes | abandonment of city centres

• Spatial planning mixed use | … | …

• And so on…


On adapting

• A co-evolutionary process between plans and social structures, economic dynamics and political changes

• Possibility up to a certain limit to alter cities’ functions without changing the physical context

• Some changes are not a matter of adapting

• Adaptation has its limits

characterized by a persistent abandonment of cities


Urban design: old determinism

• City assembled (with well designed pieces)

• A core field of research focused on the object design

• Filling the gap between architectural design and spatial planning (that became at the time much more “abstract”)


Urban design: new uncertainties

• The fast evolution of urban territories and the difficulty of identifying patterns among diversity of solutions

• Emergence of new types of spaces unclassifiable within old dichotomies (for example street corridor | fluid open spaces of the modernist city)

• The (failed) attempts to fit reality

into old planning paradigms and methods (urban renaissance movement -1990’s) and also to ignore it


Paralysing or moving on?

• Insisting on old solutions

• Fascination by new territories

• Despite of the attraction, a risk of paralysis


“The lack of resources is no longer an excuse not to act. The idea that action should only be taken after all the answers and the resources have been found is a sure recipe for paralysis. The planning of a city is a process that allows for corrections; it is supremely arrogant to believe that planning can be done only after every possible variable has been controlled.”

Jaime Lerner

Architect, urbanist, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil

(Lydon, 2012)


Tactical Urbanism (USA, mid 2000’s)

• The New Urbanism Movement (1930’s)

• The Congress of New Urbanism (1990’s)

• The Next Generation of New Urbanists (2000’s)


Tactical TIMELINE Select Patterns of Influence • 1914 NYC launches the Play Streets program

• 1950 Play Streets spread to London, England

• 1965 Seattle starts first Open Streets initiative

• 1970 San Francisco artist Bonnie Ora Sherk introduces Portable Architecture project, a forerunner of Park(ing) Day

• 1973 Guerilla Gardening efforts start in NYC

• 1997 City Repair adopt intersections in Portland

• 2001 First Pop-Up Retail event held in London

• 2005 Park(ing) Day develops in San Francisco

• 2006 Programmed, Bogotá-styled Open Streets initiatives spread to North America

• 2006 Pavement to Plazas program starts in NYC

• 2007 Depave program launched in Portland, OR

• 2007 Site Pre-Vitalization used for Hercules Market in Hercules, CA2007 São Paulo, Brazil bans billboards, inspires Ad-Busters around the world

• 2009 Pavement to Parks begins in San Francisco

• 2010 Build a Better Block started in Dallas

• 2010 DoTank Chair Bombs the Streets of Brooklyn

• 2010 NYC rebrands San Fran’s Pavement to Parks as Pop-Up Cafes

• 2011 City Point developers use Site Pre-Vitalization at Brooklyn’s Dekalb Market

• 2011 Guggenheim Museum opens its traveling Town Hall, the Guggenheim Lab

• 2011 San Francisco launches the Parkmobile

• 2011 Activists begin Weed Bombing Miami streets

• 2012 Grand Central Park, Biscayne Parkway bring insta-parks to downtown Miami


Tactical urbanism’s spatial scope

• Street | block scale

• Short term actions

• Scarce resources

• Focus on the design of concept and of process and less of the object


ACTIONS CITY DISTRICT CORRIDOR STREET BLOCK LOT BUILDING OPEN STREETS ● ● ● ● ●

PLAY STREETS ● ●

BUILD BETTER PLOCK ● ● ●

PARK(ING) DAY ● ●

GUERILLA GARDENING ● ●

POP-UP RETAIL ● ●

PAVEMENT TO PLAZAS ● ●

PAVEMENT TO PARKS ● ●

POP-UP CAFES ● ●

DEPAVE ● ●

CHAIR BOMBING ● ●

FOOD CATS | TRUCKS

SITE PRE-VITALIZATION ● ● ●

POP-UP TOWN HALL ● ●

INFORMAL BIKE PARKING ● ● ●

INTERSECTION REPAIR ● ●

AD-BUSTING ● ● ●

RECLAIMING SET BACK ●

PARK MOBILE ● ●

WEED BOMBING ● ●

MOBILE VENDORS ● ●

MICRO-MIXING ● ●

PARK MAKING ● ●

CAMPS ● ● ● ●


Chair BOMBING (Lydon, 2012)

PURPOSE: To improve the social well-being of neighborhoods by salvaging waste materials and activating the public realm.

LEADERS: Community Activists Local Property Owners Small Businesses

SCALE: Street || Building

FACT: By taking discarded shipping pallets and converting them into quality public seating, the urban waste stream can be reduced, and streets made more welcoming.


Specialising (Depave)

• Planning related with sustainability, although set procedures based on bottom to up participation and local action and define clear large objectives. In initiatives like the Depave program as a way to achieve ecological goals without having a perception of what is the final impact of the action.


Following-up (Play streets | Open streets) • Some of these groups have some learning from long time experience

of others. Open streets started in 1965 and had before the play street movements (1914) in New York City and later in London. But Play Streets movements also had their specific follow-ups to our days, mainly in the city of New York. The follow-up of original movement is characterized by more specific rules to apply to the initiatives to take place.


Adding (Pavement to Plaza | Pavement to Parks)

• Adding is another clear quality of the tactical initiatives. The fact that a city starts a certain program makes another city to follow the same example but adding some other task. Such is the case of Pavement to Plaza projects born in New York City, which inspired a similar initiative in San Francisco, although this one enlarged its scope giving place to Pavement to Parks projects.


Simulating (Site pre-vitalisation)

• Tactical urbanism is characterized by short-term initiatives. Nevertheless some of the initiatives are assumingly running tests for further permanent initiatives and occupation. Site pre-vitalization, is based on a plot that will be developed in a permanent way experiences a temporary occupation which has the role of warming-up the site in living terms.


Claiming (Informal Byke Parking)

• Most of the tactical urbanism projects are the result of a demand, either by individuals or citizens’ organizations. In some cases they also express the claim for a need. Informal Byke Parking initiative is the result of the action community activists, local businesses and property owners to supply the growing request of parking spaces for bicycles in United States’ cities.


Monitoring (Intersection Repair)

• While some initiatives are completely autonomous from public authorities, in some cases their activities are monitored, due to their specificities. In the case of the Intersection Repair project that takes place in Portland, the city´s Bureau of Transportation started by being the entity who would forbid the initiative to be the one that sanctions the works that are made by neighbors, activists, community organizations and home owners associations.


Merging? (Depave | Guerrilla Gardens)

• Quite specialised and simple actions such as depaving. An almost compulsory action from neighborhood activists and non-profits. The single activity of removing asphalt is the main goal of this group in order to increase permeability of urban soil. The way that soil will be afterwards used can be a task to another group, maybe a group composed by neighborhood advocates engaged in guerrilla gardening. Will these merge one day?


Some findings

• Several oportunities – oportunistic by nature | able to promote temporary solutions, which can be tested, monitored and integrated with formal plans | possible to evolve, adding new challenges to previous experiences | involving local actors (groups of neighbours, activists, advocates) | enabling co-evolution between local actors and public authorities

• Several challenges – to integrate other actors (entrepreneurs, local authorities) | to ensure flexibility of plans and urban design solutions in order to integrate tactical actions | to explore the potential of tactical urbanism in larger areas (cities, districts)


Final ideas on urban design

• Difference between using the space, transforming the space and transforming the space by using it (and not see it as a degenerative process)

• Importance of the concept and the process more than the object

• Shift to “local is beautiful” - small interventions anchored on comunities’ initiatives

• Urban designer: from being the creator to be aside with local actors


And two last notes:

• In Portugal, we were closer than now, to put designers working with people: SAAL was created after 1974 - an ambulatory service of local support created to help people to solve their housing needs in which simple ideas aim for simple solutions (“Mr. Architect, please design a house as if it would be to yourself”)

• A quote from 1980’s Catalan architect Oriol Bohigas (“there is nothing worse than when people of good will make mistakes”). The apparently humble statement hides an all mighty idea of the people of good will, in this case architects, urbanists and spatial planners. If they fail, the city fails. If they succeed, the city succeeds.


Thank you!


“tactical urbanism: an evolutionary approach?”

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