Tactical Urbanism for Librarians

Quick, Low-Cost Ways to Make Big Changes

Karen Munro

• Publisher: ALA Editions
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780838915585
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838915851
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

1

An Introduction to Tactical Urbanism

Once Upon a Time in DUMBO . . .

In spring 2007, a truck pulled up to a small, garbage-strewn parking lot under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn. The lot was described by people who knew it as “forlorn” and “barren” (Chan 2007; Naparstek 2007). It had space for about a dozen cars on an ungainly triangle of land where Pearl Street and Anchorage Place meet, just a few blocks south of the East River. New York is full of these oddly shaped bits of wasteland, many of them created when long avenues were overlaid on the existing street grid. In this one, Anchorage Place follows the diagonal path of the Manhattan Bridge Lower Roadway and its overpass, which looms over the lot on its west side. It was a valuable little piece of the DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t a pretty spot, or one where most people would want to linger.

The truck was from the New York City Department of Transportation. It carried a load of green paint, and its crew had specific instructions about how to apply it. They unloaded their gear and started to work.

By August the cars were long gone. The concrete triangle of the lot was painted bright grassy green, shade umbrellas and public seating had been installed, and planters overflowed with trees and flowers. In lieu of a raised curb, a double white line separated the new “pocket park” from the streets around it, with enormous granite blocks acting as bollards. Local artists had brought sculpture and distinctive handmade furniture. A local food truck began visiting the park during weekday lunch hours. The former parking lot even got a new name—the Pearl Street Triangle.

And the work didn’t end there. In March 2010, the neighborhood held an Ideas Competition to improve the park even more (dumbonyc 2010). Eight proposals suggested everything from adding another subway stop for the elevated line that runs above the park to creating tiered amphitheater seating for public performances to transforming the triangle-shaped park into an enormous interactive piano keyboard. Thanks to an arts grant, in 2012 the green paint was replaced with an enormous mural by artist David Ellis, depicting a pair of giant hands supporting a brightly colored body. In 2016, a weekly farmer’s market moved in, bringing everything from fresh produce and eggs to “old-fashioned-style barrel pickles” (Frishberg 2016).

What started with a few buckets of green paint and a few extra granite blocks from the Washington Bridge has become an “urban oasis” and “the heart of the DUMBO community” (DUMBO Improvement District 2012, 2015). Happily, the park seems to prove the truth of the Hollywood cliché: if you build it, they will come.

But there’s more to the story.

The success of the Pearl Street Triangle, and dozens of other “pocket parks” like it throughout New York City, owes as much to careful planning, solid partnerships, and visionary leadership as it does to grassroots, can-do creative spirit. It owes a great deal to the big-picture strategies of the New York City Department of Transportation and to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC program, which aims to create more open public spaces throughout the city (Chan 2007). It owes much to the DUMBO neighborhood’s Business Improvement District, which brokered deals with local artists and restaurants to make the park lively and distinctive. But it owes perhaps the most to the controversial work style of New York City’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013, Janette Sadik-Khan.

It was during Sadik-Khan’s term that the Pearl Street Triangle was realized—not just conceived, described, or approved, but cleaned up, painted, planted, and furnished. It was during her term that more than sixty public parks and plazas were created across the city, most in spaces that were considered ungainly, inefficient, or useless (Sadik-Khan 2016). And although Sadik-Khan made a lot of nice places for New Yorkers to sit, she’s perhaps even better known for getting them onto their bikes.

During her seven years with the Department of Transportation, Sadik-Khan claims that the city added almost four hundred miles of bike lanes (Lindsey 2015). During the same period, surveys show that bicycle commuting rose from just under twenty thousand to over thirty-six thousand cyclists (Flegenheimer 2013). In 2007 the New York City Department of Transportation’s twelve-hour Midtown Bicycle Count, which counts bicyclists passing predetermined points throughout the city on a given day between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., averaged 13,205 trips per year (New York City Department of Transportation 2015). By 2013 that same twelve-hour count had leaped to over twenty-one thousand trips. Broadway Avenue, one of the world’s most famous and iconic streets, closed half its lanes to car traffic to make room for a bike path and a pedestrian zone (Neuman 2008). Times Square, the garish neon heart of the city, was closed to traffic completely and became a pedestrian haven.

How did Sadik-Khan do it? How did she change one of America’s densest, most car-congested cities into a place riddled with bike lanes and neighborhood parks? How did she overcome the New York City attitudes, temperaments, and belief systems—not to mention the entrenched agency officials and taxi unions—that make a two-wheeled, park-loving revolution seem not just unlikely but almost impossible?

And what does all this have to do with libraries?

This book aims to explore the answer to all these questions through the frame of something called tactical urbanism. You may have heard of tactical urbanism before, although maybe not in the context of the New York City transportation commissioner. Instead, you may have heard of knit bombing, guerrilla gardening, depaving, pop-up shops, or programs like Play Streets and PARK(ing) Day. Maybe you’ve even participated in some form of tactical urbanism yourself, painting a mural on an intersection in your neighborhood or closing down your street for a summertime block party (with or without a permit, ahem).

Or maybe none of this is familiar to you, and the phrase tactical urbanism sounds like the next retail trend, inspired by The Hunger Games. So before we go any farther, let’s break open that phrase and start examining what a DUMBO pocket park has to do with your library.

What Is Tactical Urbanism? (And Why Should Librarians Care?)

Tactical urbanism is a relatively recent coinage to describe a type of action that people have been taking for centuries. The phrase itself isn’t written in stone—you might see terms as various as guerrilla urbanism, city repair, DIY urbanism, hands-on urbanism, participatory urbanism, and pop-up urbanism used to describe the same ideas. The nonprofit Project for Public Spaces has coined its own term—Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper—which at least helps isolate three of the central concepts in play.

But apart from those three words, what do all these phrases actually mean? Most loosely, tactical urbanism can be defined as any action designed to improve a city or neighborhood with minimal oversight, budget, and delay. Tactical urbanism is local, it’s hands-on, it’s immediate, and it can usually be accomplished without a lot of training or resources. Author Kim A. O’Connell describes it this way: “Tactical urbanism refers to temporary, cheap, and usually grassroots interventions—including so-called guerrilla gardens, pop-up parks, food carts, and ‘open streets’ projects—that are designed to improve city life on a block-by-block, street-by-street basis” (2013).

Of course, concepts such as “cheap,” “grassroots,” and even “local” are relative and open to interpretation. Although it costs almost nothing to walk or bike around your neighborhood scattering wildflower seeds into abandoned lots, it might cost upward of $5,000 to install a “parkmobile” consisting of a custom dumpster planted with tree ferns and yucca plants. Although you can knit a cozy jacket around a bike rack in your neighborhood all by yourself, you might need a planning committee and some lead time to pry up the concrete in a vacant lot and plant a community food garden. And although your neighborhood community group might creatively lobby for a new crosswalk by painting a temporary one where it’s needed, it takes a lot more political clout to install four hundred miles of bike lanes in New York City. And yet all these projects participate in the spirit of tactical urbanism to different degrees and in different ways.

At its most basic, tactical urbanism is something that just about anyone can do. There’s really no such thing as a “professional” or “expert” tactical urbanist, so it’s no surprise that different practitioners describe the concept differently. Working in a largely American context, urban designer and planner Mike Lydon and his colleagues define tactical urbanism as sharing the following characteristics:

• • A deliberate, phased approach to instigating change;
• • The offering of local solutions for local planning challenges;
• • Short-term commitment and realistic expectations;
• • Low-risks, with a possibly high reward; and
• • The development of social capital between citizens and the building of organizational capacity between public-private institutions, non-profits, and their constituents. (2015, 1–2)

Museum of Modern Art curator Barry Bergdoll, writing about tactical urbanism in the context of the developing world, describes it a little more radically:

Tactical urbanism . . . is a highly pragmatic movement that abandons all holistic and comprehensive planning as either failed in its historical record or doomed by the worldwide ascent of neo-liberal economy and politics. It is, however, an elastic movement in that it applies to a spectrum of designers, from those who perform guerrilla intervention for short-term change . . . to those who seek to prod, provoke, or stimulate the political process toward incremental realization of fragments of what might be larger networks. (Gadanho 2014, 12)

Besides the ones that O’Connell, Lydon and colleagues, and Bergdoll point out, tactical urbanist projects also tend to demonstrate some of the following characteristics: a reliance on ingenuity, a preference for rapid deployment, a willingness to experiment and revise in process, a tolerance for error and perceived failure, an ability to value intangible benefits such as new and improved relationships and proof of concept, and a willingness to start (and sometimes stay) small.

Cheap, grassroots, temporary, ingenious, adroit, experimental, pragmatic, deliberate, local, short-term, realistic, low-risk, elastic, provocative—taken together, these qualities start to cohere into a clearer profile. Tactical urbanism is scrappy, persistent, and creative. It makes the best possible use of limited resources and looks for hands-on ways to solve immediate problems (no crosswalk, ugly vacant lots) in service to a larger strategy (improving and beautifying the city). There’s still more to it, too, as we’ll see throughout this book. Tactical urbanism, because it’s performed largely by ordinary people in service to other ordinary people, is inherently human, humane, optimistic . . . and often whimsical, creative, delightful, charming, and funny. These qualities tend to arise naturally from the act of doing things in a tactical, human-centered way. They’re also practically useful and worth cultivating, because they engage and sustain people and offer an alternate means of remuneration. Warm fuzzies can’t take the place of cold, hard salary, but they can motivate people to do amazing things.

Wait . . . What Are Tactics Again?

It’s pretty important to point out at the start that tactical urbanism takes its name from tactics rather than from strategy. Tactics, whether they’re military, political, or part of a chess game, are inherently tied to strategy without being synonymous with it. A strategy is a big-picture plan designed to achieve a major long-term goal. Strategies imply the outlay of sizable resources—money, time, and people—as well as the considered, official imprimatur of an organization or institution.

Tactics, on the other hand, happen at a smaller scale. Organizationally speaking, tactics are the tasks and actions that will move you toward your strategic goals. If strategy answers the question “Why are we doing this?,” then tactics answer the question “How are we getting it done?” Tactics are immediate, practical, and limited in scope. They happen at the grassroots, local level. They’re quick to mount and often quick to disappear.

So why are tactics worth thinking about? After all, we don’t create professional aspirations around the day-to-day. We create them around long-term goals and directions—around strategy. Why spend time thinking about short-term, low-risk projects when what we really want is to build a city—or a library—that will thrive and flourish a decade or a century from now?

As Mike Lydon and his colleagues remind us, “If done well, these small scale changes are conceived as the first step in realizing lasting change. Thus, tactical urbanism is most effective when used in conjunction with long term planning efforts” (2015, 2). Operating from a tactical mind-set doesn’t mean acting randomly or without consideration (more on that later in this chapter). In an ideal world, tactics and strategy work hand in hand—tactics help deliver what strategies dream up. In a less-than-ideal world, where strategy can get bogged down, abstract, or disconnected from reality, a tactical intervention can be a way to reboot the strategic planning process in new relationship to concrete, real-world factors. Curator and architect Pedro Gadanho describes tactical urbanism as “acupunctural interventions” (2014, 19). Like the single, tiny needles of acupuncture, tactical interventions can be powerful points of action, radiating energy to create a larger network of change.

Okay, but Really—What Does This Have to Do with Libraries?

A lot. At least, I think so. This book works from the premises that cities and libraries have a lot in common and that librarians can learn from tactical urbanist projects of all different types and scales. Here’s why.

Librarians who want to change libraries face many of the same challenges faced by ordinary citizens, city planners, and even lofty transportation commissioners who want to change cities. Many of us have to do things we’re not trained, equipped, or funded to do. Sometimes we have to fix or create things we’re not even clearly charged with fixing or creating, simply because they so obviously need to happen. (Check out Terry Reese’s [2013a] MarcEdit project, for instance.) Many of us operate from a position of daily intimacy with the issue at hand. We walk on the broken sidewalk, or use the flawed software, or dream of the renovated exhibition space every day. Many of us have to create our action plan on the fly, developing our ideas, narrative, and partnerships as we go. We’re not experts. We’re thoughtful, energetic, creative, occasionally slightly obsessed people with ideas. Tactics offer us all a framework for action that’s flexible, extensible, and fun to use—and that has proven to be effective whether you’re flush with cash or broke.

Because tactical urbanism is defined by a creative, resilient, democratic response to challenges, and because it typically operates in service to a larger purpose (a better neighborhood, a better library), it’s a potent complement to traditional organizational structures. In other words, your library can probably encourage a tactical culture without conflicting with existing hierarchies, reporting structures, budgets, and so on. In fact, I’ll hope to show that a tactics-friendly mentality is a healthy component of any library’s culture. We’ll talk more about that in the section of this book that directly addresses library administrators.

If you’re still feeling dubious about whether a knit-bombing, depaving, guerrilla-gardening ethos has any place in libraries, remember that though libraries today might have a reputation for staid traditionalism and bureaucracy, they also have a historical entanglement with social upheaval. As Scott McLemee (2011) wrote in an Inside Higher Ed article about the Occupy Wall Street library in Zuccotti Park, “Libraries emerged as part of the sit-down strikes that unionized the American auto industry in the 1930s” as well as in worker-run education centers for low-income users established around the country. Librarians have been at the forefront of civil protest and activism against government policies of surveillance, invasion of privacy, and censorship—even when that protest was at its most costly, such as in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the United States or in modern-day Mali, where Al Qaeda has attempted to confiscate and destroy historic Islamic books and manuscripts. Throughout history, libraries have been sites of social engagement, subversion, innovation, and even revolution. At times, the very business of conserving, preserving, and providing access has been a radical affair. As we weigh the importance of some of our institutional habits and traditions, we must remember that just as librarians have at times been conservative, risk-averse, and conventional, we have also been progressive, open-minded, and even revolutionary.

So Are We Talking about Cities or Libraries?

That’s a good question. Let’s consider the modern city—a large (sometimes vast) and complicated organization with a lengthy personal history. A city is traditional, retentive, and conservative by nature. It represents vast sums of public investment as well as vast areas of public liability. It’s shared by people from all walks of life, all income levels, all religions and ethnicities. It’s run by a bureaucracy, usually made up of experts. Its operations are rife with loopholes, exceptions, requirements, regulations, standard practices, omissions, and work-arounds. It’s hierarchical, yet its membership a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. An Introduction to Tactical Urbanism
• 2. Tactical Urbanism Case Studies
• 3. A Realistic Tactical Approach
• 4. Library Case Studies
• 5. Library Meets City
• 6. Coming Back to Earth
• 7. A Library Leader’s Guide to Building a Tactical Library
• 8. Twelve Steps to Becoming a Tactical Library Interventionist
• 9. Summing Up
• References
• Index