Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Pop-Up Urbanism to Build Community Health
I enjoyed, but was also a bit disappointed by, a recent Health Affairs article by David Erickson and Nancy Andrews looking at the role that community development could play in contributing to community-wide health and well-being. Their point, which is an important one, is that as research continues to establish clear links between community factors and health, community level initiatives will offer one of the most critical avenues for addressing the social determinants of health--and essentially, improving the health and well-being of large numbers of people for a pretty low price. I was disappointed, however, because they kept their focus on formal community development organizations--but it seems likely to me that many of the most significant community health initiatives will emerge not from traditional development, but in tandem with more emergent, bottom-up community experiments.
A great article in Miller-McCune highlights some recent, particularly interesting examples, of cheap but effective citizen-led efforts to improve local communities as examples of what the article calls pop-up urbanism.
Those who undertake such up-from-the-sidewalks initiatives call them by various names: tactical urbanism, pop-up urbanism, urban acupuncture — or in one blogger’s ornate locution, “Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerrilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism.” The events can be as short-lived and mobile as the organizing of local food trucks to meet at a certain spot where lunch options are scarce, or the annual Parking Day, when activists in scores of cities, armed with as little as AstroTurf, lawn chairs, and quarters for feeding the meter, turn an on-street parking space into a park for a few hours. Other projects, like placing low-tech swimming pools in areas where recreation options are lacking, may last for a season. The New York-based design firm Macro Sea has done this with Dumpsters that were custom-ordered and modified by their manufacturer for this very use.
“The experimental approach is local and low risk, with low expectations,” says Mike Lydon, a planner and principal of the urban-design firm Street Plans Collaborative. “You can try things out at a small scale and see what works.”
Lydon wrote a downloadable catalog-cum-manual called “Tactical Urbanism: Short Term Action/Long Term Change” with other activists including Aurash Khawarzad, a planner who founded a group called DoTank:Brooklyn. DoTank events have ranged from holding a potluck community party under an elevated expressway to “chair bombing” — crafting Adirondack-style chairs from shipping pallets and depositing them unbidden outside laundromats and other places where people have to spend stretches of time.
People like Lydon and Khawarzad, trained in architecture and planning, would argue that some examples of pop-up urban reinvention are more effective than others. The point of the potluck was to demonstrate that the space under the highway could be put to uses more valuable than parking. Chair bombing highlights the absence of amenities in spots where people are obliged to spend time; in some cases, property owners have since added seats of their own.
I think this last point is key--what some of these bottom-up efforts can offer are examples of better ways of organizing communities so that they are designed more effectively for more people. And as research about the health effects of community become clearer, and more publicly known, many of these experiments will likely involve creative efforts to enhance community health.
There's a second, more subtle point here. I've previously noted research linking strong social connections--and communities where there are high levels of social cohesion and trust--to improved community health and well-being. And these sorts of bottom-up initiatives seem like a particularly simple, but potentially transformative route for communities to feel more connected, engaged with and ultimately more trusting in their community.