Tactical Urbanism: Short-term action for long-term change

See updated version of this article here.

Why wait for neighborhood change when you can do it yourself?

Citizens are taking into their own hands at improving the livability of their neighborhoods and cities, investing in demonstrations of what a vacant space or underutilized street could look like. This growing guerrilla, pop-up, D.I.Y. movement is collectively known as tactical urbanism. The folks at The Streets Plan Collaborative have even written a guide, Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action, Long-Term Change. Below are the tactics described and beautifully illustrated in the book:

Blocks:

• Site Pre-Vitalization – Temporary activation of a development site, often using shipping containers. Cooltown post.

Underutilized Streets:

• Open Streets – Massive temporary street closures like Ciclovía and summer street closings in NY, SF. Cooltown post. Open Streets Project.
• Play Streets – Repurposing parking lots and streets from car usage to kid usage. Partnership for a Healthier America: Play Streets
• Better Block – A weekend pop-up demonstration of what a main street could be, gone viral. Cooltown post. The Better Block.
• Pavement to Plazas – Transforming auto-oriented streets into pedestrian plazas. Cooltown post. NYC Plaza Program, Pavement to Plazas initiative.
• Intersection Repair – Transforming neighborhood street intersections into neighborhood squares, mainly via paint and street closures. City Repair: Intersection Repair.

Vacant Spaces:

• Guerilla Gardening – Re-purposing underutilized lots for ‘social gardening’. GuerillaGardening.org.
• Park(ing) Day – Crowdsourcing parking spaces into ‘third places’ for a day. Cooltown post. Park(ing) Day. (See image above, in Portland, OR.)
• Pop-Up Retail – Temporary stores in vacant spaces, prevalent in every major city. Cooltown posts.
• Pop-Up Parks – Transforming streetside parking spaces into micro parks. Park(ing) Day types of places, but for months. Cooltown post. City of San Francisco: Pavement to Parks. City of NY: Street Seats.
• Depave – Green city movement to remove unnecessary paving and replace with green spaces. Depave organization.
• Park-Making – Reclaiming underutilized sites for parks. Cooltown article.
• Parkmobiles – Movable landscaped containers that can placed in a standard on-street parking space. Parkmobiles.

Guerilla Intervention

• Chair Bombing – Homemade seating in public spaces “to improve comfort, social activity, and sense of place”. DoTank: Chair Bombing.
• Informal Bike Parking – Non-government installed bike racks that are functional indications of where permanent bike parking is needed.
• Ad-Busting – Removing and altering of billboards and large advertising signage. Ad busting on Tumblr.
• Reclaimed Setbacks – Activating front yards to become more community-oriented.
• Weed Bombing – Converting weed overgrowth into landscaped works of art. Weed bombing on Tumblr.

Entrepreneurial Development

• Food Carts/Trucks – Essentially pop-up cafes on wheels, prevalent in most every major city. Cooltown post.
• Mobile Vendors – Aka street vendors, and including bicycle vendors.
• Micro-Mixing – Mixing multiple businesses in a single retail space, like a cafe, bar, bookstore, theater: Cooltown article.

Social Change

• Pop-Up Town Hall – A non-government meeting space to discuss the future of one’s city.
• Camps – Temporary occupying of space with intention of social change (i.e. Occupy movement), disaster relief, or experimentation/prototyping (Burning Man).

About The Author

neilkt