TO
PLAN OR NOT TO PLAN in the contemporary city
Urban Dynamics Seminar 640105
Department for Urban Planning
Winter Semester 19/20
Tooska Mosavat
CONTENTS
1. ABSTRACT
2. RESEARCH QUESTION
3. METHODOLOGY AND BACKGROUND
4. INTRODUCTION: PEOPLE, URBAN PLANNING, CITY
5. PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT
A. ILLUSTRATION CONCEPT
6. PLANNING
7. MAIN BODY
A. JANE JACOBS
A 1. ILLUSTRATION JANE
B. PARTICIPATORY PLANNING
B 2. WHO PARTICIPATES
B. 2. 1. ILLUSTRATION ACTORS
B. 3. DECISION MAKING
B. 3. 1. TOP DOWN / BOTTOM UP
B. 3. 1. 1. ILLUSTRATION TOP DOWN / BOTTOM UP
B. 3. 2. MULTILAYER APPROACH
B. 3. 2. 1. ILLUSTRATION MULTILAYER
C. CONTEMPORARY CITY
C. 1. ILLUSTRATION CONTEMPORARY CITY
C. 2. DYNAMIC
C. 3. SCALE
C. 4. POWER-FINANCING
8. TACTICAL URBANISM
A. PARK(ING) DAY
A. 1. ILLUSTRATION ONE
A. 2. ILLUSTRATION TWO
B. POP UP TOWNHALL
B. 1. ILLUSTRATION ONE
B. 2. ILLUSTRATION TWO
9. CONCLUSION
10. BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. ABSTRACT
The paper studies the reaction of people to their specific urban context in participatory models. Jane Jacob’s thesis attacks the traditional urban planning, providing an initial point as a background to conclude with the nowadays Tactical Urbanism movements, field of the main question How do people conquer the already planned contemporary cities? Along with other questions such as What’s the professional’s role among the technical knowledge? How much responsibility can be given to the people? Where is the balance between the planned and not planned? Does it really exist? To visually see how citizens react to urbanism answers, a series of diagrams are illustrated. Over time and in conjunction with the evolution of theories that involve social participation, the research advances and aims to contribute as a model for more descriptive visual diagrams as a tool to help understand the complexity of the contemporary city and its inhabitants.
2. RESEARCH QUESTION
Could participatory planning be the way people can conquer the already planned contemporary city?
3. METHODOLOGY AND BACKGROUND
For the preparation of this research, the students organized diverse literatures focused on the approach of the participation of civil society in urban projects based on backgrounds of their home Universities, the content of the seminars of this subject, their personal experiences and, of course, the living fields and dynamic of big cities.
Janes Jacobs in The Life and Death of the Great American Cities is the basis, in both students' understanding, of a perception that approaches the main topic and supports subsequent literatures that evolve the notion of participation in architecture and urbanism. As well as Jan Gehl in his theoretical trajectory and experiences involving people and the dynamics of cities, as in Copenhagen, Denmark. As participants in the process of change from the point of view of the project approach, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba during the renovation of the Brazilian city, are actors that contribute in an interdisciplinary way to the continuity of this research. Other works are also extremely important as content generators, they are: THE ENABLING CITY, A ladder of citizen participation. Sherry R. Arnstein, A Plea for Beauty: A Manifesto for a New Urbanism and 21 tactical urbanism vol 1 and 2, which contributed enormously and also instigated the feeling of conscious action in conjunction with the notion of ephemerality as a field yet to be explored as a possible solution to the dynamic demands of cities. All this research material made us reflect on Cities for people and to come closer to an ideal that has always hovered among Urbanism research: Cities by people
For this, the Paper first introduces the notion of the inseparability of Planning, City and the Inhabitant in its role as a citizen, also intends to make clear the concepts used and introduce vocabularies formed by from the need for better words to explain the content. Ahead, a text structure is subdivided. The Main-body contains subtitles: Participation, Decision Making and Contemporary City that deepen the topics covered and, at the same time, lead the reading that wants to answer the questions and possibly bring new ones in the Conclusion.
Tactical Urbanism appears as worthy of our attention, as a tool - among other titles - of a process that seems to involve the main points of this research: the dynamics and the demands of the contemporary city together with the participatory movement. For this reason, for us, this topic not only includes this academic contribution in a way in which it is possible to perceive, on the way to work, how we were guided to it, but also keeps the possibilities for continuing this research open and encouraged.
4. INTRODUCTION: PEOPLE, URBAN PLANNING, CITY
“Man is by nature a social animal [ ] Society is something that precedes the individual ” - Aristotle, Politics
In essence, we can define a city as a large human settlement Urban planning and cities itself are at the same time inextricably linked. In the same way that the city and people wouldn’t exist without one another. This makes the planners the ones responsible of creating the setting where most human interaction occurs They are the ones in charge of shaping our everyday lives, without us even noticing most of the time. These planners can be those with technical knowledge and government support, formal planners that are legal decisionmakers and, most of the time - especially in the modern tradition of planning -, they operate in a large scale. However, they can also be "ordinary people" who use their creativity and have some random background knowledge to realize their idea in some site of the city, in a small scale In both examples, Urban Planning pervades People and builds the City.
Eventually, citizens are the ones that “suffer” the consequences (positive or negative) of urban planning. So, shouldn’t they take a bigger role on these decisions?
5. PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT
The connotation given for the concept PLAN – NOT PLAN in the paper. As a way to visually connect People and Urban Planning, two extreme hypothetical places are imagined:
-PLANNED ENVIRONMENT: people don’t use their freedom to choose, all the choices have already been made for them.
-NOT PLANNED ENVIRONMENT: there is a necessity of making choices all the time. In this hypothetical place, the reaction of people can be ACTIVE or PASSIVE
A. ILLUSTRATION CONCEPT
6. PLANNING
“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, BrazilPlanning is all around us. It has always been used as the easiest way to come to a solution – as a scientific methodology to solve any problem Regarding the cities, many examples along the history show us how a total planning or master plan hasn’t worked, due to its large scale and high costs, and at times, even forgetting the real needs of those who was planned for, the citizens A remarkable example is the modernist city of Brasilia, planned by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa Time has proved that the lack of walkable public spaces and the excess of car ways, don’t make it the great city that was aimed to be However, in order to function properly, there should be some kind of planning in the cities, so no planning at all isn’t a valid answer neither.
The concept desired should be somewhere in the middle. The place where there is a somehow planned environment but also space for the people to be able to use their freedom to make new choices.
This leads to the main research question:
“Could participatory planning be the way people can conquer the already planned contemporary city?”
7. MAIN BODY A. JANE JACOBS
“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities,1961)
In Janes Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the author invites the reader to start to analyse the cities using the feelings and perceptions of a street walker, playing the role of the neighbour in his wellknown urban context or the surrender curious visitor, when exploring. With her own experiences, or her friends and child ones, she discovers what works and why in the context of a city. This approach is revolutionary for the 1960’s, when answers was being given by the moderns in an exclusive-academic level and the cities was being used as a laboratory of experimentations.
The critic goes in the direction of the distance between who plans and who uses, but do not question the Planning as the answer build by the professional. The Planning she criticises, is the modern one, limited for the Zones and restricted uses of the land, which, in her own words, is the cause of “The self-destruction of diversity” and “The curse of border vacuums” (p.241 and p.257; JACOB, Jane; 1961) in the urban-texture. Her answer is the use of Planning strategies as the “Generators of diversity” (p.143): The need for mixed primary uses; The need for small blocks; The need for aged buildings and The need for concentration, as a theory that have being followed until nowadays.
Jane’s approach is not understood as a Participatory movement, but as being new in theorising the perception of the street walker and in getting close to the people’s opinions.
A. 1. ILLUSTRATION JANE
B. PARTICIPATORY PLANNING
Public participation in cities is nothing new. Although Jane Jacobs was the first one to make a theoretical approach, there are many previous interventions.
During the 1500, informal “pop-up” bookstores were set along the Seine in Paris. This idea didn’t end up there, it has evolved until the nowadays “book fairs” that are located all over the world. This case shows how an active reaction of citizens, who used a space given not for what was planned for, has remained and evolved throughout time
However, the aim of this paper is to focus in the contemporary city. The present era is mainly characterized by the fast transmission of information, thanks to the Internet. Some of its consequences are not only the easy access to the information, something that leads to a growing demand for participation, but also it is seen as a tool to facilitate the participatory processes.
The Internet, used as a tool, does provide a huge amount of data and facts that can be used in the process of planning. Currently, the main objective in the public participation field is to achieve convenient and useful participatory methods.
An example for that is Decide Madrid. It is an online platform working since 2015, where people can post their proposals, ideas, projects… to be later voted by citizens in Madrid. They can also vote how and for what participatory budgets should be used. The most remarkable ones are brought to the government and discussed, and at times evenrealized. Since its launching it has been replicated in cities all over the world such as Buenos Aires, Paris, Valencia or Turin.
B 2. WHO PARTICIPATES
For the purpose of continuing this academic work, we will understand the actors as those who, voluntarily or not, are involved in some way in the decision-making process in some common issue related to an area of the city. It is possible to divide them into three large groups: State, Private sector and Civil society. However, it is in the subdivisions and how they interact with each other, a way to understand more deeply how this process occurs. It should be also clarified that the boundaries between the different stakeholders are fluid, and usually create networks without a clear hierarchy.
B. 2 1. ILLUSTRATION ACTORS
B. 3. DECISION MAKING
Participatory planning is understood as the one where civil society takes a part somehow in the process of decision making. And eventually, these who make the decisions are the ones who own the power.
B. 3. 1. TOP DOWN / BOTTOM UP
“Characteristics of City 2.0: Combines a bottom-up approach with leadership that sees service users not as consumers but as participants, stepping away from traditional paternalistic approaches of professional control and ethics that characterized the post-war period.”
- Page 14. The Enabling City
During the 1960s, with the rise of social movements demanding more public participation, the bottom-up approaches appeared. They emerge as a reaction to the top-down processes used before in centralized systems, where a broad central plan was implemented Their main demand is a bigger focus on local issues involving different stakeholders For the first time the role of the state was questioned, should it just take part as a coordinator instead of a powerholder?
In most nowadays government structures, this would mean a decentralization of the managing systems, giving more power to local authorities, where small scale plans can be developed and applied. However, first of all, the capacity of the government or local authorities should be looked at, as it is the base to a proper functioning system.
Page 1, http://neptuneasc.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/NeptuneAdvisory-Organizational-Survival-Oct-2018.pdf
“Recognizing that citizens have more than just needs, participatory frameworks diffuse creativity and distribute it to ‘non-specialized’ people, empowering them to employ innovative thinking in meeting their own needs. The results are encouraging in the policy-making sphere, greater recognition of experiential knowledge is slowly making way for new forms of democratic engagement that open up opportunities for dialogue and diversity. Outside of the spaces for participation that citizens and communities carve out for themselves, governments can also rely on devolution, decentralization, and delegation as mechanisms for opening up previously closed spaces of decision-making. Artreach and Code for America are both examples of how governments can invest their capital to join forces with other actors so that we can move from speaking of ‘government’ to speaking of governance a testament to the belief that steering is more empowering than ruling.”
- Page 66. The Enabling City
Instead of thinking in a linear way of decision-making, a multilayer adaptive approach seems to incorporate better in the small scale the importance of the opinions in a process that allows corrections, and revision or creation of new levels of operation. This facilitates and encourages association between actors in a collaborative network in each particular way of a possible intervention in a contemporary and dynamic city.
C. CONTEMPORARY CITY
Nowadays, most of the world’s population lives in cities. They have become complex urban territories, sometimes known as megacities, due to the quick population growth and the growing interrelation between them - globalization Cities are under constant transformation, they evolve as their inhabitants’ needs change, and they should be able to adapt to keep up with them. Cities are not only the result of the urban plans, but its combination with all the unplanned decisions that come with the ordinary living of its citizens
C.1. ILLUSTRATION CONTEMPORARY CITY
C. 2. DYNAMIC
“
But the principal lesson was not learned: that plans have unintended consequences that accumulate over a far longer period, ultimately outweighing the short-term benefits.”
- Page 2 A Plea for Beauty: A Manifesto for a New Urbanism
The dynamics of the city demand both short and long-term decisions. However, we learned from the mistakes of closed and aggressive modern urbanism, that the decisions imposed by the zoning model, plastered cities. These, today, have many open fractures due to the bureaucracy, the amount of money needed for financing and the physical arsenic of the large concrete and iron constructions that are not simple to be modified.
C. 3. SCALE
Talking about scale is synonymous with influence. In the context of a city today, there is a danger that large-scale influences will be encouraged in an imposing manner. Due to the dynamics and fluidity of the contemporary city, it seems more reasonable for the influence to grow in the opposite way, that is, starting from the local and reaching the global. So, the particularities of neighbourhoods can be respected, since the action is directed, validated and created in the same context in which it is implemented.
C. 4. POWER – FINANCING
The relationship and support between economic and social financing power can be measured in a society according to the impact that will be generated by some decision making, as well as considering who is the one starting the project and who will benefit ultimately. In a capitalist system of economics, long-term
decisions on large scales will always be guided by the imposition of the economic factor. However, as defended in the context of this chapter, combined with short-term decisions and local scale, a wide range of possibilities for relationship and support between economic and social power-financing is open. These relations can be of the most varied categories and weights, always depending on the particularities of the place in question. A new way of relating to the power-financing becomes possible.
8. TACTICAL URBANISM
“Short-term livability improvements demonstrate that improving the built environment is possible, and sometimes, only requires proactive policies and a little gumption. When executed well, such efforts help generate demand for even more substantial livability improvements. […] But whether top-down, bottomup, or both, tactical urbanism is just another way we urbanists can help make a more pleasant, varied, and dynamic human habitat.”
- Page 21. Tactical Urbanism VOL 1
Tactical Urbanism is a manifesto that has been drawing the attention of professionals, citizens and governments in the last years. It combines the Participatory Movement approach in the context of the Contemporary City and its demands.
The participatory movement is at the heart of Tactical Urbanism. It is necessary to involve and understand the urban context in order to achieve their real demands, to know the citizen's place of speech. Aware that choices were made all the time by different hierarchical layers in the decision-making process that involves the growth of a city, the citizen, with his previous knowledge as a resident, is qualified to become an important part of the dynamics of these power relations. Not only politically, but seeking, in some way, to bring more benefits to the place where he recognizes himself.
The actions of Tactical Urbanism are small and temporary interventions in the urban fabric, at the human scale, made by a person or group of people who can represent different institutions and form partnerships, or simply be spontaneous and ephemeral. It is a way to promote the cooperation between local actors and public authorities.
The most important thing is always the context. That is why the term Tactical refers to what can be touched, what can be real, even if it is for a moment. The ideas are implemented and tested by the people, and if successful, even be integrated with formal plans.
It is a movement rather than a fixed solution to a problem, so it can be as dynamic as the city is. It works, as said before, with the particularities of each different case, giving power to the individuals in the local scale.
The design of the Concept and the Process of making become bigger than the final Object itself. This calls attention to the present time, to life in community and to a potential for change that is more coherent with human scale and its aspirations.
A challenge that tactical urbanism still has to face is, for example, the way this ideas can be implemented in the bigger scale.
The following examples explore the conclusions acquired in this Paper and intend to illustrate the applied content of Tactical Urbanism.
