Tactical Urbanism

Short-term Action for Long-term Change

Mike Lydon,Anthony Garcia

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781610915670
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

In the twenty-first century, cities worldwide must respond to a growing and diverse population, ever-shifting economic conditions, new technologies, and a changing climate. Short-term, community-based projects—from pop-up parks to open streets initiatives—have become a powerful and adaptable new tool of urban activists, planners, and policy-makers seeking to drive lasting improvements in their cities and beyond. These quick, often low-cost, and creative projects are the essence of the Tactical Urbanism movement. Whether creating vibrant plazas seemingly overnight or re-imagining parking spaces as neighborhood gathering places, they offer a way to gain public and government support for investing in permanent projects, inspiring residents and civic leaders to experience and shape urban spaces in a new way. Tactical Urbanism, written by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, two founders of the movement, promises to be the foundational guide for urban transformation. The authors begin with an in-depth history of the Tactical Urbanism movement and its place among other social, political, and urban planning trends. A detailed set of case studies, from guerilla wayfinding signs in Raleigh, to pavement transformed into parks in San Francisco, to a street art campaign leading to a new streetcar line in El Paso, demonstrate the breadth and scalability of tactical urbanism interventions. Finally, the book provides a detailed toolkit for conceiving, planning, and carrying out projects, including how to adapt them based on local needs and challenges. Tactical Urbanism will inspire and empower a new generation of engaged citizens, urban designers, land use planners, architects, and policymakers to become key actors in the transformation of their communities.

04 OF CITIES AND CITIZENS: FIVE TACTICAL URBANISM STORIES

Co-creators fill the ever increasing gap between official action and official resources with their efforts and their presence can be the difference between a city that is “loved” and a city that is merely lived in.

—PETER KAGEYAMA

For the Love of Cities¹

Behind every successful Tactical Urbanism project there is a compelling genesis story, a tale often born from frustration that leads to a creative response addressing some known challenge in the built environment. In this chapter, we share five such stories elucidating how short-term tactics aimed at disrupting the status quo generated long-term transformation in the physical environment, policy, or both. They are:

• Intersection repair

• Guerrilla wayfinding

• Build a Better Block

• Parkmaking

• Pavement to plazas

In addition, you’ll find most contain an additional case study, or a story within a story further contextualizing the impact these initial projects have made elsewhere.

Whether led by enterprising citizens working without permission from city hall or by bureaucrats working from within—government “intrapreneurs”—we want to underscore that small acts do not evolve into larger ones without leadership. Often, the leadership comes from just a small group of people who help bring many, many more people into the process so that they too understand what’s possible.

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We want to underscore that small acts do not evolve into larger ones without leadership.

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Describing the power and importance of such prioneers, who often go underappreciated by formal community leadership, For the Love of Cities author Peter Kageyama writes, “The city, as a whole, is made by a relatively small number of ‘co-creators,’ who—in their roles as entrepreneurs, activists, artists, performers, students, organizers and otherwise ‘concerned citizens’—create the experiences that most of us consume.” Kageyama continues, “Many of these co-creators act without authority or centralized direction, and it is from their creative efforts that the rest of us benefit. They make the experiences that we delight in, and they have a disproportionate impact in the making of the city.”²

Tactical Urbanists are your community’s co-creators, and they often blur the lines between city planning, public art, design, architecture, advocacy, policy, and technology. To this last point, each of the stories included in this chapter benefited tremendously from the rise of radical connectivity, which we described in chapter 3. For example, Matt Tomsaulo’s initial Walk Raleigh “guerrilla wayfinding” project used a suite of web-based tools to create the project, document the installation, advocate for its legitimacy, and ultimately raise the needed funds to get scalability. Or in New York City, Global Positioning System (GPS) units placed in New York City taxis collected and transmitted data allowing the Department of Transportation (DOT) to analyze and substantiate the positive impacts the pedestrianization of Times Square was having on travel speeds through perpetually congested midtown Manhattan.

Today, there are an uncounted number of citizen-led, do-it-yourself, and “creative placemaking” projects being carried out globally by so-called everyday people. However, it’s important to note that most of the actors featured in this chapter had some familiarity with the local civic process or received an education background related to the art of city building. This undoubtedly helped make their projects successful. However, we are excited that an increasing number of cities are looking toward the use of Tactical Urbanism as a means to empower nonexperts, those with a lot less familiarity with the conventional project delivery process, to get involved with placemaking. It’s a positive trend and one that we think should accelerate.

We hope the projects and the people behind them inspire you as much as they’ve inspired us to integrate Tactical Urbanism into our professional consulting and personal advocacy work. We attempt to describe the lessons learned from each project throughout the chapter, but we also offer a more complete how-to in chapter 5, which is designed to help you undertake a Tactical Urbanism project in your community today.

INTERSECTION REPAIR

What is the city but for the people?

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Coriolanus

Project Name: City Repair

Year Initiated: 1997

City of Origin: Portland, Oregon

Leaders: Citizens, enabled by municipalities

Purpose: To develop neighborhood street intersections as community space for increased safety and health

Fact: In the Sunnyside Piazza neighborhood of Portland, 86 percent of respondents living within two blocks of the repaired intersection reported excellent or very good general health, compared with 70 percent in the adjacent neighborhood control site.³

Portland, Oregon is a city where a bike path floats on water, lush rain gardens adorn walkable streets, and a delightful array of food carts mask the downtown’s few remaining surface parking lots. Although Portland’s exceptionalism—real and imagined—has required strong political leadership, it’s more accurately a reflection of a progressive citizenry that has developed a culture of civic involvement geared toward transforming the city. Perhaps nothing reflects this better than the story of City Repair and its signature project: intersection repair.

City Repair is an approach to community building and neighborhood placemaking that uses permaculture, natural building techniques, and public art to instigate civic participation. These efforts include intersection repair, which reclaims a neighborhood intersection to make it more attractive and safe enough to serve as a place for neighbors to gather. In Portland, it began with neighbors painting a large mural in an intersection and adding a variety of public amenities such as benches, public information kiosks, and a lending library along the street edges. Intersection repair projects may include private property as well as the public rights-of-way.

City Repair is also the name of the volunteer organization that began as a loosely affiliated group of activists in 1997. Today, it is a not-for-profit that provides support and guidance for Portlanders and inspiration for those globally interested in improving their neighborhoods through peer-to-peer collaboration. The organization also spearheads Portland’s annual Earth Day celebration and has developed an annual placemaking event called the Village Building Convergence, which involves hundreds of people working simultaneously at dozens of project sites across the city.

Mark Lakeman’s backyard T-Hows created a community gathering place in Portland, OR in the mid-1990s. (Photo by Melody Saunders)

The organization provides technical assistance for citizens and local organizations interested in developing their own projects. The approach allows communities to take ownership and emphasizes the importance of neighbors creating change together. The organization’s leaders are adamant about their role as facilitators, not designers. Such an approach builds social capital and empowers residents because they are directly involved in the funding, design, implementation, and maintenance of the project.

The ascent of the organization and its creation of the intersection repair tactic are instructive because they demonstrate how small, unsanctioned, and low-cost citizen-led initiatives can evolve into much larger city-sanctioned and globally recognized efforts.

When the City of Portland determined that the T-Hows violated the city’s zoning laws, Mark Lakeman reassembled it on a pickup truck to create a mobile teahouse, the T-Horse. (Photo by Sarah Gilbert, cafemama.com)

Modeling a Different Future

The City Repair story begins in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood. Located on the southern edge of the city, up on a Willamette River bluff, the neighborhood was then, as it is now, full of modest one- and two-story cottages and bungalows. It was this neighborhood where Mark Lakeman says he began to “model a different future and empower others to achieve it.”⁴

Lakeman is the son of a two socially minded architects who taught him the value of planning and design. Lakeman recalls thinking that planners “were like super heroes, envisioning things before they ever existed. It was powerful stuff.”⁵ Although he later realized how politically charged—and successful—his father’s downtown projects were, he also learned that everyday citizens did not play a role in conceiving or building them. Moreover, with their focus on downtown, they did not bring needed amenities to the neighborhoods where most Portlanders live.

After spending several years living abroad and studying the ways other cultures arranged their social and physical living patterns, Lakeman returned home in 1995 only to experience culture shock. Fresh off a stint living and working with Mayans in the Mexican and Guatemalan rain forest, he grew frustrated with how isolated he and his Portland neighbors were from each other, despite living in such close proximity. According to Lakeman, “I looked around and went, ‘Nobody here has ever made the choice to zone their life!’”⁶

In an effort to bridge this gap he convinced a few friends to help him create a place where people could meet each other, share resources, and generally build a stronger sense of community. Using natural and recycled materials costing a mere $65,⁷ Lakeman designed a small community building where people could meet over tea. He called it the T-Hows (pronounced “teahouse”). It was assembled in the backyard of a Sellwood home and quickly became the site of weekly meetings and potlucks where neighborhood residents met and shared in the amenity of the new community space. It became clear almost instantly that Lakeman tapped into an unmet demand for social gathering space.

Yet the structure was built without a city permit and large enough that it violated the city’s zoning laws. After 6 months of growing popularity, city officials finally called for its removal. Always a step ahead, Lakeman had designed the structure to be easily dismantled. He simply reattached the T-Hows materials (recycled Plexiglas, wood, plastic sheathing, and bamboo) to an old Toyota pickup truck to create a mobile teahouse, dubbed the T-Horse. This mobile version was designed to deliver an instant community meeting place wherever it stopped. According to the Social Environmental Architects art exhibit blog, the T-Horse “emerged to transcend the remote power of the city to decide the destiny of communities.”⁸

Daniel Lerch, who now works for the Post-Carbon Institute, says that it was while attending an early gathering at the T-Horse with about 200 others that he realized that urban sustainability begins not with light rail systems and LEED buildings but with social relationships. Lakeman’s T-Horse, which could be considered a more civic-minded precursor to the rise of the food truck craze, was an intentionally low-cost, mobile, and tactical way to activate public space while also helping people build social relationships across the city.

The T-Horse brought the power of the T-Hows to a much wider audience and quickly became a physical platform for an array of community discussions about s...