Photo left: Parade of striking telephone workers marching down Market Street, 1947. San Francisco History Room, San Francisco Public Library
William Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) –Michel de Certeau
–Situationists
Temporary Urban Experiments in Creating New Public Spaces
Temporary Urban Experiments in Creating New Public Spaces
Street Saturday, October 22 • 1 to 5pm
Sidewalk Saturday, October 8 • 1 to 5pm
Location Meet at Harry Bridges Plaza (Market Street at the Embarcadero)
Location Sites from Mid-Market to the Ferry Building See studioforurbanprojects.org for exact locations
“We have given a disproportionate amount of our street space to vehicles, and the time has come to start giving some of it back to the pedestrians from whom it was taken.”
Can the street become defined through its patterns of use? Can the increasing numbers of cyclists down Market Street help to enact new ways of thinking about bike lanes, intersections and interactions between people on bikes, on foot, in cars or riding transit? Join us for a ride down Market Street where we will inscribe our route, charting this space for bikes in advance of better bike infrastructure. Over the course of our route we will look at the Market Street Bike
Lane Trial, discuss plans in progress for future trials and gather ideas for how to design a better Market Street. Bike-share bikes will be available for use on a first-come, first-served basis. This event is free and open to the public. It is part of the exhibition Reclaim Market Street! created by the Studio for Urban Projects and exhibited at SPUR. Please visit the exhibition at 654 Mission Street, San Francisco.
Created in collaboration with Rebar, ULICU, the San Francisco Bike Coalition and the San Francisco Great Streets Project. This project is made possible through the generous support of SPUR and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
How can we redefine the social life of the sidewalk? Amidst the hustle and bustle of commerce and business how do we slow to the pace of conversation, interaction or reflection? Can we create places to sit, make or play? This one-day event will explore these questions through a series of artists interventions along Market Street. The day will profile the work of Paul Benny, Michael Swaine, Futurefarmers, Genine Lentine, Joshua Short, and others.
This event is free and open to the public. It is part of the exhibition Reclaim Market Street! created by the Studio for Urban Projects and exhibited at SPUR. Please visit the exhibition at 654 Mission Street, San Francisco.
This project is made possible through the generous support of SPUR and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project is made possible through the generous support of SPUR and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. In addition, the Studio for Urban Projects would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their help in developing Reclaim Market Street! Individuals: John Bela Paul Benny Lisa Beyer Jennifer Caleshu Chris Carlsson Noah Christman Margaret Crawford Brianna Cutts Lisa Ruth Elliott Courtney Fink Pepin Gelardi Blaze Gonzales Clive Hacker Teresa Herrmann Andy Hill Gretchen Hilyard Kit Hodge Helen Ip
Sarah Karlinsky Liz Keim Brett MacFadden Karen Mauney-Brodek Blaine Merker Gabriel Metcalf Brady Moss Matthew Passmore Liza Pratt Rick Prelinger Karen Steen Melinda Stone Rachel Strickland Michael Swaine Scott Thorpe Anessa Watson Anton Willis
Organizations: Bay Area Discovery Museum Futurefarmers MacFadden & Thorpe Rebar San Francisco Bicycle Coalition San Francisco Great Streets Project San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR) Streetfilms Shaping San Francisco ULICU
RELATED PROGRAMMING Occupations of Market Street Date/Time: October 1, 11:00am–3:00pm Location: Meet at Harry Bridges Plaza
(Market Street at the Embarcadero)
Design: MacFadden & Thorpe: Clive Hacker and Helen Ip
This event is free and open to the public. Join us for a walking tour amplifying the street as the stage for history, political dialogue and activism. In what ways has Market Street been used for political ends throughout its history? How do we claim this space as we consider the street’s future? This four-hour walk down Market Street will feature author, activist and historian Chris Carlsson, who recently edited Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968–1978. He is also one of the initiators of Critical Mass and has spearheaded a San Francisco participatory history project titled Shaping San Francisco. Special thanks to Chris Carlsson and Lisa Ruth Elliott of Shaping San Francisco in developing this event.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Date/Time: Tuesday, November 15, 6:00–8:00 pm Location: SPUR, 654 Mission Street, San Francisco This event is free and open to the public. Urban planner William H. Whyte’s study The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a profound study of urban space. In the 1970s, using methods of direct observation—including photography, film and notation—Whyte and his research assistants compiled a survey of New York’s plazas, streets and sidewalks, examining pedestrian behavior and dynamics. In The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Whyte presents his witty and insightful views on what makes public space thrive. Please join us for a screening of this seminal film.
In 2015, Market Street will be remade as the culmination of a four-year public process called the Better Market Street Project. Reclaim Market Street!, created by the Studio for Urban Projects, augments this ongoing community program by staging a series of interventions that engage the public in changing the street. Accompanying these events is an exhibition at the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR) that provides context for these pilot projects by highlighting the many ways in which cities, nationally and internationally, are engaged in reimagining their public spaces through experimental urban planning.
RESOURCES Web Sites: •Project for Public Spaces:www.pps.org •The San Francisco Great Streets Project: www.sfgreatstreets.org •The San Francisco Bike Coalition: www.sfbike.org •Shaping San Francisco: www.shapingsf.org •The Prelinger Library: www.prelingerlibrary.org •StreetFilms: www.streetfilms.org •Velorution: www.velorution.biz •Better Market Street: www.bettermarketstreetsf.org Books: •Arvid Bengtsoon (ed.), Adventure Playgrounds, Crosby Lockwood, 1972. •Mia Birk, Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet, Cadence Press, 2010. •Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of Minnesota Press 1998. •Florian Haydn and Robert Temel, Temporary Urban Spaces: Concepts for the Use of City, Birkhäuser, 2006. •Jeffrey Hou (ed.), Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, Routledge 2010. •Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books, 1989. •Ed Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist International Anthology, Bureau Of Public Secrets, 2007. •Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities, Oregon State University Press, 2009. •Simon Nicholson, How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts •Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, The MIT Press, 2008. •William Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Project for Public Spaces Inc, 2001.
–Johan Hizinga
Temporary Urban Experiments in Creating New Public Spaces Plaza Saturday, October 15 Playspace: 1 to 5pm Screening: 7pm
Temporary Urban Experiments in Creating New Public Spaces
Location UN Plaza (Market between 7th & 8th Streets)
Can plazas be made more dynamic by serving different age groups and interests over the course of a day? Can children be better integrated into the life of the street, learning to become citizens through their participation in the city and protected by the watchful eyes of neighbors? UN Plaza will be transformed into a play space for children, parents and friends. By day, it will feature the Imagination Playground kit by David Rockwell. In the evening, this space will host a public screening of the 1906 film A
Trip Down Market Street and its 2005 remake by Melinda Stone and Liz Keim. Archivist Rick Prelinger will show films from his collection focusing on the history of Market Street as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers. This event is free and open to the public. It is part of the exhibition Reclaim Market Street! created by the Studio for Urban Projects and exhibited at SPUR. Please visit the exhibition at 654 Mission Street, San Francisco.
Created with the support of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. Imagination Playground on loan from the Bay Area Discovery Museum, Sausalito, CA. Special thanks to Karen Mauney-Brodek, Dana Ketcham, Lisa Beyer, Brianna Cutts and Jennifer Caleshu. This project is made possible through the generous support of SPUR and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
Believing that artists can be provocative agents in helping us to reimagine our cities, the Studio for Urban Projects—in collaboration with artists, activists, designers and city officials— has created this project as a way of helping us to claim Market Street in this crucial moment. Beyond commerce, business and the movement of the automobile, what do we want to use our streets for? Can we claim the street for conversation, action, play, lounging and making? Can we use this space primarily for those who walk, bike or take public transport?
Can we prioritize the social life of the street? These efforts are part of a broad national and international movement in which people are claiming streets and making experiments, trials and prototypes. In Paris, a thoroughfare by the Seine has been turned into a beach. In New York, traffic has been cut off to Times Square, and now people lounge in chairs on the former roadway. In San Francisco, parking spaces are slowly being turned into parks. All over the world people are closing roads to the automobile for a day, a week, a month or a year and exploring new ways to define our city streets. These experiments are being propagated by artists, advocacy groups and progressive city governments. Their interventions help us to imagine what is possible in our cities and become catalysts for permanent change. We invite you to join us over the course of the exhibition to participate in changing San Francisco’s Market Street. What we do here will inspire the new direction of our civic spine and create new models in the worldwide movement to make streets about people. —Studio for Urban Projects
Founded in 2006 the Studio for Urban Projects is an art and design collective that perceives art as a means of advancing civic engagement and furthering public dialogue. Our interdisciplinary and research-based projects aim to provoke change by re-framing our perceptions of the city and physically transforming elements of the built environment. Engaging the broad themes of ecology and urbanism, our projects have taken the form of audio tours, interactive websites, exhibitions, urban interventions, and architectural environments. Through these projects we reflect upon the cultural dynamics that shape our urban landscapes.
TEMPORARY URBANISMS
The 1965 event in which Provo placed 50 free white-painted bikes on the streets of Amsterdam. | Photo: Provo
BY MARGARET CRAWFORD
WHITE BICYCLE Artist Amber Hasselbring’s 2009 PARK(ing) Day installation, “Working Bee Park,” featuring native bee–attracting plants installed on Valencia Street in San Francisco. Photo: Alison Sant
PARK(ING) DAY Location: Initiated in San Francisco, CA Size: 2-3 parking spaces Cost: $7,000–$40,000 to 2 or 3 spaces Duration: The duration of paid parking on a parking meter Year: 2005-present More Info: parkingday.org
Permanent Breakfast held in the Czech Republic, 2009. Photo: Permanent Breakfast
PERMANENT BREAKFAST Location: Public spaces chosen by participants, initiated in Vienna, Austria Size: 5 people Cost: Variable Duration: The length of a meal Year: 1996–present More Info: p-breakfast.net
Initiated in 1996 by artist Friedemann Derschmidt in Vienna’s Schwarzenbergplatz, Permanent Breakfast is a temporary urban intervention in which participants are invited to a public breakfast and then asked to continue the action by staging breakfasts of their own. By occupying public spaces, participants change the nature of the places they are in, converting sidewalks, plazas and parking spots to spaces of food preparation, eating and conversation. According to the snowball concept of the project, 1.6 million people would have participated in a public breakfast by the 10th day of the project. The event has been staged in many cities, including Prague, Berlin, Oslo and Melbourne, and hundreds of breakfasts have been documented since the project’s inception.
PARK(ing) Day is an annual daylong global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public places. The project began in 2005 when Rebar, an interdisciplinary art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in an area of San Francisco that is underserved by public open space. A quintessentially “open source” project, PARK(ing) Day has since been adapted and remixed to address a variety of social issues in diverse urban contexts around the world. Over the years, PARK(ing) Day has expanded to include a broad range of interventions well beyond the basic “tree-bench-sod” park typology first modeled by Rebar. Participants have created interventions ranging from free health clinics, urban farming and ecology demonstrations to political seminars, art installations, free bike repair shops and even a wedding ceremony! Occurring annually on the third Friday in September, in hundreds of cities around the globe, PARK(ing) Day has effectively re-valued the metered parking space as an important part of the commons—a site for generosity, expression, socializing and play. And although temporary, PARK(ing) Day has inspired direct participation in the civic processes that permanently alter the urban landscape. In San Francisco, it has inspired the city’s official parklet program and is a model for how artists’ interventions can help to provoke official city policy.
Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands Size: 50 bicycles Cost: Unknown Duration: 1-day event distributed bikes that remained in circulation for approximately a month before most were stolen or missing Year: 1965 More Info: tinyurl.com/3oen5ez
The White Bicycle program began in 1965 as a guerrilla event, staged by an Amsterdam anarchist collective called Provo. Conceived of by Provo member Luud Schimmelpennink, the first White Bicycles were 50 white-painted, secondhand bikes placed anonymously in public places. The event was designed as a provocation, to question the need for private automobiles and stress the practicality of free, public modes of transportation. The White Bicycle program was the first of many bicycle share programs. The concept has been referred to by a range of names including community bicycle programs, public use bicycles, free bikes and bike libraries, among others. Although originally organized mostly by local community groups or nonprofit organizations, many of these programs are now being implemented by municipalities, governmental agencies or public-private partnerships. Bicycle shares allow anyone to pick up a bike, ride it a short distance and leave it at the destination for others to use. Current programs typically use “smart bikes,” which can only be unlocked and ridden with personal identification through magnetic cards. Users typically pay a fee (either per-use, like a subway ticket, or by credit card) to use the bikes, which helps cover the program cost. Large-scale bike share programs have been launched in many cities, including Vélib' in Paris (2007), Bixi in Montreal (2008), Capital Bikeshare in Washington, DC (2008), OYBike in London (2010) and EcoBici in Mexico City (2010). In 2012 San Francisco will launch its own bike-sharing program. The $7.9 million pilot program, funded by the Metropolitan Transit Commission, will create depots for 1,000 smart bikes around the city and at Caltrain stations on the Peninsula.
Kids playing in the flagship Imagination Playground at Burling Slip in New York City. Photo: Alison Sant
IMAGINATION PLAYGROUND Paris Plages installation in 2009. | Photo: Earthworm Online Photo/Video
PARIS PLAGES
June 1996 Critical Mass ride along Howard Street in San Francisco. Photo: Chris Carlsson
CRITICAL MASS Location: Initiated in San Francisco, CA, and hosted in over 300 cities worldwide Size: An average of 1,500 riders Cost: None Duration: 1 evening a month Year: 1992-present More Info: foundsf.org
Critical Mass is a mass bike ride scheduled during rush hour on the last Friday of every month. This bicycle transit movement began in San Francisco in September 1992 with 45 riders, and has continued every month since, growing to an average of about 1,500 riders and topping 5,000 on several occasions. Since its inception it has spread to over 400 cities around the world. Critical Mass offers itself as “an antidote to the elimination of public space,” and, in making bicycles become the traffic, upends traditional hierarchies of cars and cyclists.
Location: Paris, France Size: 2 miles Cost: $3 million Duration: 1 month Year: 2002-present More Info: parisplages.paris.fr
First initiated in 2002 by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, Paris Plages (“Paris Beaches”) is a monthlong annual event where the City of Paris creates temporary urban “beaches” along the right banks of the Seine River. A major motorway clogged with heavy traffic most of the year, the Georges Pompidou Expressway transforms into an outdoor getaway. This temporary pedestrian promenade offers sand-filled beaches with deck chairs, palm trees, hammocks, a swimming pool that floats on top of the river and fine-water misters to cool off in. The beach is animated day and night with activity, including dance lessons, beach volleyball, music concerts and sand-castle building. Now, in 2011, there are three different beach areas along the Seine River running from the Louvre to Pont de Sully to the Port de la Gare and the Bassin de la Villette. The event has been duplicated in other cities, including Rome, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Vienna.
Rebar’s “Walklet,” a modular parklet system installed on 22nd Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. | Photo: Rebar
The pedestrian plaza in Times Square, 2009. | Photo: NYC DOT
PARKLETS
GREEN LIGHT FOR MIDTOWN
Location: San Francisco, CA Size: 1 or more standard parking spaces Cost: $7,000–$40,000 Duration: 1-year renewable permits Year: 2010 onward More Info: sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org
Parklets offer a fast, inexpensive way to create long-desired pockets of open space on city streets, relieve sidewalk crowding and boost local businesses. They are modular, removable open spaces that usually occupy one to three curbside parking spaces, thereby extending the open space of city sidewalks. Parklets often include seating areas, planters, bike racks and cafe tables. Inspired by Rebar’s guerrilla art intervention PARK(ing) Day, parklets began being implemented as part of San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks program in 2010. The Department of Public Works has created a public approval process for new parklets. In 2011, more than 70 individuals and businesses applied. There are currently 14 completed parklets, with more approved and on their way to construction. Typically, the parklets are erected and maintained by local citizens and businesses rather than the city government. Parklets are an innovative way to create new public green space, incrementally and inexpensively. While engineering a sidewalk can cost $1.5 million per city block, parklets are inexpensive and can be added or moved sequentially. Perhaps not surprisingly, the concept is spreading to other cities around the country and world; parklets have been called San Francisco’s “most intriguing urban design innovation” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Location: Initiated in New York, NY Size: Approximately 225 square feet Cost: $4,550 to $7,600 per kit Duration: Variable Year: 2010-present More Info: imaginationplayground.com
Architect David Rockwell designed the Imagination Playground to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play. The playground is an assortment of “loose parts,” a term coined in the 1970s by architect Simon Nicholson, who believed that inventiveness and creativity are directly proportional to the number of possibilities and variables children are given. In the Imagination Playground these “loose parts” include an assortment of movable objects, including blocks of different sizes and shapes, crates, fabric and carts. In keeping with the tradition of the Adventure Playground, children are able to play in an environment they can manipulate and construct. Their play is monitored by “play associates,” who enable children to direct their own play and maintain a safe and secure environment free of excess adult intrusion. The imagination playground is constructed as a portable kit that allows it to be installed in diverse settings and at relatively low cost. This is appealing in areas of the city where there are not currently formal playgrounds. Imagination Playground box sets installed in publicly accessible play spaces all over the world, with over 50 in the United States alone.
Contrail devices trace a collectively made bike path. | Photo: Contrail
CONTRAILS Transit rider enjoying the swing installed at the Exmouth Market bus stop in London. | Photo: Bruno Taylor
SWING BUS SHELTER Location: London, England Size: 1 bus shelter Cost: Variable Duration: Temporary Year: 2008 More Info: tinyurl.com/4465b23
The Swing Bus Shelter was created by industrial designer Bruno Taylor for London bus stops. Noticing that “71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now,” Taylor asks, “Are we designing children and play out of the public realm?” Taylor’s objective was to make public places more playful by incorporating incidental play into existing street furniture instead of separating it through specialized equipment or isolated playgrounds. The Swing Bus Shelter was created by installing swings on a number of bus shelters around London, inviting children and adults alike to playfully enjoy their commute.
Location: Brooklyn, NY Size: 2 inches x 5 inches Cost: $40 Duration: Several days Year: 2010-present More Info: bikecontrail.com
Contrails are devices for marking bike lanes, conceived of by Pepin Gelardi and Teresa Herrmann of ULICU, a New York company. The device mounts on a bike and sprays a stream of water-soluble temporary paint on to the back wheel. This enables individual riders to leave colorful graphic traces of their paths. Contrails have the potential to create a truly emergent, crowdsourced model for creating bike routes. The aggregation of many individual traces can create a dense network of paths, diagramming the most popular and safe routes in a city. At the same time, they can discourage people driving motor vehicles from impinging on those routes. This is perhaps the most extreme version of bottom-up, guerrilla tactics: each individual rider can contribute to the formation of a tangible bike network, simply by following his or her preferred route.
NEW YORK CYCLE TRACK Location: New York, NY Size: 80 blocks Cost: $2.7 million per year Duration: Permanent Year: 2008-present More Info: tinyurl.com/3muv3td
Perhaps the safest way for people on bicycles to travel through cities is on cycle tracks— bike lanes that are physically separated from motor vehicle traffic. The concept originated in Europe and is popular throughout the world; in the U.S., it has been implemented most broadly in Manhattan. Cycle tracks can be separated from traffic by bollards, median strips, trees or—most commonly—parked cars. In New York, the bike lane is located between the sidewalk and the car parking lane; the row of parked cars creates a physical barrier against moving traffic. In New York, over 80 blocks of cycle track have been implemented, with more planned. Since this approach typically requires adjusting the programming of the street, it has not been without controversy. However, extensive studies throughout the world have shown tremendous benefits for street safety and comfort for people on bikes, on foot or in their car.
In 2008, as part of a commitment to transform the city’s streets and sidewalks into new, lively public urban space, the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) began the Sustainable Streets Program in close collaboration with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, an overall initiative calling for long-term sustainability for the city. In 2009, the NYCDOT implemented the Green Light for Midtown as a temporary pilot project that aimed to improve mobility and safety in the city’s chaotic Times Square District by reinventing underused and misused roadway space in order to create quality public space for residents and visitors alike. Green Light for Midtown began as a series of changes to traffic patterns in the Broadway corridor of Midtown Manhattan. Certain sections of street were converted to pedestrian zones barricaded from automobile traffic, and these zones were filled with movable lawn chairs and shade umbrellas. The city has held public art contests to create pavement patterns and murals on the ground surface to visually set these plazas apart from roadway traffic. Due to improvements in mobility along the Broadway corridor, and because of this new, improved quality of life, the city has plans to transform these temporary trials into a permanent plaza.
Recently, artists, planners, city governments and urban activists all over the world have awakened to the possibilities of urban time. In response, they have started encouraging and orchestrating a multiplicity of temporary urbanisms. These events and practices are the products of many different impulses, ranging from oppositional politics to the purely commercial, and from DIY provocations to top-down planning. Yet, at the end of the day, the city’s inhabitants play the central roles in this public drama; their engagement, in small or large numbers, gives public significance to what might otherwise remain private gestures. This exhibition highlights several genres of temporal urbanism particularly resonant in San Francisco. As the hometown of Critical Mass, the city isreceptive to creative bicycle activism, combining performance art and politics to reclaim the streets. With diminishing numbers of children in the city, reintroducing play, long banished from city streets, makes a poignant statement. Local artists who are highly attentive to the specificity of urban phenomena have moved into the street in significant numbers, actively intervening in public spaces. Commercial activities such as street markets and vending, although not new, produce other types of temporary spaces. Purists might wonder if such moneymaking activities address the public good, but by attracting and bringing together large numbers of people in sociable circumstances, food trucks and vendor carts can also transform city spaces. Even without overt political goals, mobility allows them to create instant public spaces in almost any street, sidewalk or parking lot. Their activities reverse bicycle activism, which brings citizens to the city. Instead, they bring the urban experiences of food and eating to the citizen, particularly in underserved parts of the city. It is no accident that Portland, Oregon, a pioneer in urban biking, also encourages all kinds of food trucks and vendors.
Location: New York, NY Size: 23 blocks Cost: $1.5 million Duration: Ongoing Year: 2009-present More Info: tinyurl.com/dmjncz New York City’s separated bike path and greenway along Broadway. | Photo: Mia Birk
Urban life takes place in time as much as space. The natural rhythms of day and night, the changing seasons and even the far longer passage from birth to death have always structured our experience in cities. In modern cities, the daily and weekly cycles of the workday and the weekend and the yearly schedule of events, holidays and vacations shape not only urban experience but even urban space itself. Cities are built to accommodate these functions but their physical forms, constructed for permanence, rarely acknowledge their temporal dimension. The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre argued that every city has a unique rhythm, shaped by its history, geography and culture. He warned that cities that focus on space while ignoring time risk losing their souls and turning into generic and dead places.
Moving Forest installed in Amsterdam, 2008. | Photo: Mi Schoner
MOVING FOREST Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands Size: A bunch of shopping carts Cost: N/A Duration: 1.5 months Year: 2008 More Info: droog.com
Moving Forest was a temporary mobile park designed by Dutch architects NL and Droog Design and developed for the 2008 ExperimentaDesign event in Amsterdam. Consisting of 100 trees planted in 100 shopping carts, the project proposed a way of making green space, with minimal materials and labor, in areas of the city that usually do not have them. The mobile trees were placed to allow playful interaction as visitors rearranged the temporary park. At the end of the installation, participants were encouraged to take the trees and plant them throughout the city.
All of these practices and activities illustrate the transformative possibilities that temporary uses can generate. Orchestrated in time, a single space can acquire multiple identities, adding new and unexpected meanings without dislodging existing ones. Such shape-shifting urban spaces are flexible and responsive to changing circumstances. As ad hoc urban laboratories, they are ideal experimental venues to test different locations, activities and schedules. The multiple publics they serve are ultimate arbiters. Events and activities that don’t interest them or serve their needs will quickly vanish, while those that do are likely to endure. After teaching a course about temporary urbanisms, my personal collection of examples now fills two large boxes and over a gigabyte in my computer, demonstrating the proliferation and bewildering complexity of such practices. A recent New York Times article complained
that Manhattan pop-ups (both for- and nonprofit) are now so ubiquitous that they no longer possess any “alternative” cachet. How can we make sense of this vast array of intentions and activities? The French philosopher Michel de Certeau divided urban practices into two opposing trajectories: strategies and tactics. He defines strategies as the ways those with power own, occupy and control space. Tactics are the opportunistic practices the weak employ to temporarily hijack these spaces for their own use. According to de Certeau, tactics, although often remarkably creative, are always ephemeral, inevitably eliminated by strategic power. But his pessimistic formulation is too simple, ignoring another form of temporality: repetition. Repeated many times, by many people, tactics can turn into strategies, thus ensuring their long-term survival. A good example is the way in which the tactical activity of PARK(ing) Day inspired the more permanent and official planning strategy of parklets. Now, both coexist on the streets of San Francisco without apparent contradiction. Defamiliarization is another relevant concept. By “making strange,” this modernist artistic technique forces the audience to see common things in new and unfamiliar ways. This strangeness opens us up to reconsider existing circumstances, question the status quo and imagine other possibilities. After seeing hundreds of bicyclists take over a street normally occupied by cars, we’ll never that street the same way again. Defamiliarization often takes the form of inversion. Visiting a farm on the Champs-Elysees or sunbathing on Paris Plage turns urban experience upside down, placing the countryside and the beach in the middle of an environment normally devoted to work, shopping and tourism. Temporary urbanisms can also refamiliarize urban space. By injecting human presence and meanings into alienating urban spaces, they render them more welcoming and comfortable. People and objects come to life. A woman wearing an apron selling homemade tamales summons up images of domesticity and family life, rather than the anonymity of the street or the impersonal exchange of a commercial transaction. The success or failure of temporary urbanisms can be difficult to determine. Even popular events can vanish in an instant, victims of their own ephemeral nature. The energy required for continual improvisation often exhausts sponsors and volunteers, leading them to abandon their efforts. Other events outlive their time, becoming routine and calcified, such as Manhattan street fairs. Once vitally local, they became generic and predictable. At a moment of fiscal crisis, lowcost and impromptu public activities appeal to planners, but maintenance and permanent changes will require far greater public commitment and expenditure. But these are minor concerns. Time, now recognized as a dynamic force in urban life, will continue to reshape cities and enrich urban life.
Margaret Crawford is a Professor of Architecture at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. She has authored and edited several books including The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life and Everyday Urbanism, and has published numerous articles on shopping malls, public space, and other issues in the American built environment. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space.