A short history of tactical urbanism

From coning AVs to makeshift street signs, there's a long tradition of concerned citizens intervening in their urban environment

The other day I wrote about the San Francisco activists using traffic cones to disable driverless cars, ahead of an important vote today on the next phase in the program by the state regulator. I linked this to a long tradition of using “tactical urbanism” to improve the built environment and encourage citizen participation. And guess what! The CPUC postponed the vote on AV expansion another month, until August 10. Community engagement, sometimes it really works!

Today I want to go deeper on the theory of tactical urbanism, also known as “pop-up,” “DIY,” and “guerilla.” Whichever the name, the concept broadly describes interventions in the urban landscape by local residents, typically in response to perceived inaction or neglect by authorities and almost always without official permission. This form of urban activism has been described variously as spontaneous, playful, innovative, sophisticated, opportunistic, and straight-up cool. It has been used in active protest, like the anonymous activists “coning” AVs in San Francisco, or in quiet frustration after people got tired of waiting for their local government to fix a simple and eminently fixable problem.

The phrase “tactical urbanism” is typically attributed to Mike Lydon, an urban planner in New York who wrote the book on it in 2015. Lydon considers TU to be an umbrella for a wide array of small-scale actions designed to improve the local urban environment, which he terms “tactics.” These include pop-up shops and cafes; guerrilla gardening; play streets closed to cars; and “park(ing) days” on which car park spaces are briefly reclaimed for people-friendly uses, like setting up picnic chairs or a ping-pong table.

Excerpt from a pamphlet on tactical urbanism edited by Mike Lydon.

There is long, rich tradition of tactical or DIY urbanism in the U.S. There is also sometimes a sense that this form of urbanism is a uniquely American phenomenon. It fits neatly with the national mythology of Horatio Alger, the preference for small government, and the popular adage that if you want something done right, do it yourself. In reality the only thing uniquely American about tactical urbanism is our inclination to view it as yet another instance of American exceptionalism.

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One of my favorite histories of tactical urbanism comes from Emily Talen, professor of social sciences and director of the Urbanism Lab at the University of Chicago. Talen begins her 2014 article, “Do-It-Yourself Urbanism: A History,” by observing that the sort of small-scale, informal interventions considered “novel” and “revolutionary” in wealthy nations like the U.S. are often “standard protocol” in other parts of the world:

For the most part, the approach is distinguished by being in direct opposition to top-down, capital-intensive, and bureaucratically sanctioned urban change of the kind most often associated with urban planning. In the US case, this signals a disinterest—or perhaps disillusionment—with changes promised through more conventional routes like tax increment financing districts, design guidelines, or comprehensive planning. It has been described as an attempt to ‘‘skirt authority’’ that signals a restive public not content to wait for planners and architects to accomplish better living environments.

In the U.S., Talen traces DIY urbanism to late-1800s efforts to plant trees and beautify public spaces led by “hundreds of mostly women-led village improvement societies.” The groups later organized into the American League for Civic Improvement, but in their early, less formal days, were concerned with anything from digging sewers to planting flower beds. These small, hyper-local actions were an especially notable contrast to the modernist urban utopias that were popular at the time, like Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. Here is Talen again:

These efforts, whether motivated by beauty, redemption, conservation, or complexity, can be viewed together as interrelated attempts to improve cities in small-scale ways, from the bottom-up, and without the direct involvement of government. The overall trajectory was in two broad phases. The first phase focused on small-scale urban beautification and civic improvement, motivated in part by a desire for social change through physical neighborhood improvement. A second phase involved recognition of the need to foster urban complexity and diversity explicitly, via small-scale interventions that contrasted with top-down, large-scale, orthogonal planning. In either phase, from beautification to Everyday Urbanism, urban improvement existed outside the purview of government-sanctioned planning agendas.

The instances of tactical urbanism we tend to hear about these days usually involve somewhat renegade efforts to fix long-ignored issues. One that periodically pops up in the news is Crosswalk Collective LA, a group of anonymous activists who paint zebra crossings at unmarked intersections they perceive as dangerous, often to the delight of the neighborhood and chagrin of city officials. This is the tension at the heart of tactical urbanism: what some see as necessary interventions, brought on by persistent government inaction, could also be described as reckless or even lawless. Crosswalk Collective LA last year organized a Gofundme after several of its members were forced to stop painting three crossings near a local school by Los Angeles police and issued citations of $250 each.

Credit: @crosswalksla

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The tactics of tactical urbanists are not unlike those of many startups that operate in the public realm. Both tend to subscribe to the philosophy of “ask forgiveness rather than permission” and believe that any pushback they might encounter from local authorities is the price of teaching the city to love what they are offering. This, after all, is how Uber introduced us to ride-hailing and Bird and Lime acquainted us with rental electric scooters. These days those systems are governed by rules and contracts and RFPs, but in the beginning the Ubers and Birds appeared in our lives because some tech bros and venture capitalists with the money and resources to do so decided they should.

Money, resources, and power may very well be the dividing line between interventions that remain in the realm of tactical urbanism and those that go on to become formal services. It turns out that having millions or billions of dollars and powerful connections, like, say, a former Obama aide leading your policy team, goes a long way toward being granted that forgiveness you asked for and having rules and laws changed to suit your service. It also helps in making your service or product so widely available that cities have no choice but to engage in a dialogue about how to make it work on a formal level.

This is a necessary threshold for lasting changes to the urban ecosystem, and it is much harder to reach when you are a small group of activists stealthily painting crosswalks one by one, or coning AVs by night, than a technology firm with the backing of Silicon Valley. What if instead of Crosswalk Collective LA, the group painting crosswalks was a nascent but well-funded tech startup pursuing contracts with municipal governments to analyze and improve dangerous urban intersections? It might not work, but also it might quickly be promoted from the category of rogue citizen to promising urban tech solution.

Money and power is hard to ignore when considering the conflict between Safe Street Rebel in SF and the driverless car firms. After investing more than $100 billion in developing autonomous technologies, the self-driving car companies seem to feel entitled to the city as urban laboratory, regardless of what the people who live in those cities think about it. Shortly after the CPUC delayed its vote on the next phase of the program, GM-owned Cruise took out a full-page ad in the New York Times designed to shame the public into getting on board with Cruise’s vehicles. Safe Street Rebel also recently alleged on Twitter that Cruise vehicles are now being tailed by private security in SUVs.

In other words, tactical urbanism is always a story of David vs. Goliath. Because the actions are by definition informal and small scale; because they come from concerned locals rather than a formalized group; because they are rarely if ever funded to any significant degree. That can make it hard for the actions of tactical urbanists to stick, but it also makes the movement hard to snuff out.