Learning from Bottom-Up Urbanisms: New Tactics, New Times, New Places, New Processes, and a New Aesthetic

Carlos García Vázquez

ccggvv@us.es

ETSA. Universidad de Sevilla, Spain

In May 2009, the New York City Department of Transportation dared to close Times Square to traffic, equipping the pedestrianized public space with a series of modest planters. Unexpectedly, the new square became crowded with people, to the extent that the city had to purchase hundreds of garden loungers to accommodate them. One year later, Mike Lydon and Anthony García, directors of The Street Plans Collaborative, founded the "Tactical Urbanism" movement. In the second volume of the book "Tactical Urbanism" (2012), The Street Plans Collaborative compiled 24 tactics for intervening in public space under the movement's umbrella (Lydon et al., 2012). These were interventions carried out in the United States during the previous decade by groups such as City Repair, Rebar, or Depave. What these actions had in common was social activism, informality, temporariness, the use of low-cost materials, and, most importantly, their bottom-up nature: the majority of them had been proposed, implemented, and managed by local communities.

Dearq magazine's latest issue is dedicated to what are known as bottom-up urbanisms. In truth, their origins stretch back well before the cases documented by Lydon and García in their book. Some trace this trend back to the 1970s, closely associated with the countercultural movements of that decade. In any case, what is evident is that bottom-up urbanism began to gain traction after the economic crisis of 2008 and received official recognition from public authorities following another crisis, this time a health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020.

After over four decades in development, bottom-up urbanism has solidified an approach to city planning characterized by its primary hallmark: the active involvement of residents in the design, execution, and management of their projects. This fundamentally sets it apart from institutional urbanism, which heavily relies on top-down processes. In this article, we will delve into this duality and explore the contributions that bottom-up urbanism can offer to institutional urbanism in the present day. The latter has been facing operational crises for decades, primarily due to its lack of resilience and its inability to adapt to the various crises that cities have experienced in recent decades - crises that, ironically, have propelled the rise of bottom-up urbanism (García Vázquez 2022, 141-183).

introduction

In the late 1960s, a time that coincided with the emergence of the ecological crisis and the outbreak of social protests leading to the May 1968 events in France, grassroots movements began to emerge. These movements expressed a sense of not being adequately represented by their democratically elected political leaders. They demanded direct input on decisions that directly affected their lives. However, these decisions were being made far from their local communities by politicians who were out of touch with their daily realities. The decisions were often imposed through a top-down approach, leaving the local population feeling disconnected. These protesters questioned the concept of representative democracy and called for a shift toward direct democracy.

Forty years later, following the 2008 crisis, neoliberal orthodoxy knew how to harness this very impulse to promote its austerity policies. It began by discrediting state intervention and praising individualism, eventually extolling the virtues of direct democracy and citizen participation in decision-making. In this vein, the conservative government of the United Kingdom introduced a "Duty to Involve" regulation in 2009, requiring local authorities to encourage and nurture a culture of active participation among the population and grant people decision-making authority. All of this was part of the Big Society project, designed to transfer a significant portion of the responsibilities that the State had previously assumed back to society. Almost the entire political spectrum, from left to right, ultimately converged on the idea that this bottom-up approach to decision-making was more legitimate and democratic than the traditional top-down model. The British citizens themselves also came to realize that they could not remain passive recipients of decisions made by their political representatives, often incapable of providing solutions to their problems. They recognized the need to initiate their own endeavors, interacting with the State only when absolutely necessary.

In the realm of urban planning, the scrutiny of representative democracy has placed on the discussion table the matter of the entities tasked with shaping and transforming cities, particularly, the roles they each play. In brief, the three traditional entities have been the State, developers, and citizens. The top-down approach, typical of institutional urban planning, situated the State at the pinnacle of the decision-making pyramid, involving developers and urban planning professionals, while placing citizens at the foundation. Today, the traditional allocation of roles among various urban actors has lost much of its credibility. Since the late 1990s, numerous academics and urban planners have turned their attention to the so-called "bottom-up urbanisms." These approaches are intended to flip the pyramid by proposing and implementing ideas driven by local communities, sometimes entirely detached from institutional urban planning. Their objective is to challenge conventional power structures and the top-down methods they employ, empowering citizens to address issues and challenges that institutional urban planning often struggles to handle promptly. To empower citizens, bottom-up urbanisms promote community interaction, encourage them to prioritize their interests, provide easier access to resources, and harness their skills.

This approach has enriched the traditional quartet of urban planning agents (municipality-urbanist-developer-citizen), inviting numerous new figures to join this landscape. Most of these new figures represent various segments of the citizenry: local communities, shared interest associations, political activists, countercultural groups, artists, disadvantaged collectives, and more. Others hail from the realm of the sharing economy (non-profit organizations, local entrepreneurs, etc.), or they are business coalitions (property associations, Business Improvement Districts, etc.). Lastly, the representation of the State agent tends to manifest through a multitude of urban agencies with diverse objectives and interests. The types of relationships established among these agents span from autonomous self-organization to state coordination.

Neoliberal governments have also taken an interest in bottom-up urbanism. They have discovered a way to address some of the gaps created by their austerity policies or, in simpler terms, an opportunity to reduce some of their obligations to citizens. Municipalities, whose budgets were severely impacted by the post-2008 crisis, found relief in the micro-interventions conducted by bottom-up urbanism in public spaces and underutilized areas. These initiatives provided citizens with facilities that municipalities couldn't afford to offer. In an environment characterized by economic, social, and environmental uncertainty, the flexibility of these informal actions stood out against the backdrop of the orthodox, bureaucratic, and inflexible institutional urban planning.

This explains why, for bottom-up urbanism, the 2008 crisis provided a platform for their ideas, which had previously been primarily limited to counterculture and political activism. Fran Tonkiss (2013) coined the term "austerity urbanism" for the neoliberal planning constrained by budget cuts and deregulation. He argued that bottom-up urbanism had seized the opportunity to intervene in the gaps created by this approach:

Forcing open the cracks in these contexts involves identifying the weaknesses, the joins, the blind spots and inconsistencies in a given strategy or settlement, and working both against and within them. The metaphor of the crack takes on material form in a marginal urbanism that goes to work on edges and in tight spaces in the lacerated cities of austerity economies. (Tonkiss 2013, 317)

Tonkiss identified four approaches in the relationship that cities had maintained with bottom-up urbanism. Some had enacted legal, political, and ownership measures that aligned with the framework of the groups promoting bottom-up urbanism, thus authorizing their actions¹. Other cities did not actively facilitate these initiatives but did not exclude them either, allowing for certain areas of tolerance². A third group of cities, the most orthodox, completely excluded any dialogue, leaving little to no room for negotiation with bottom-up urbanism, which they enforced through punitive and even police measures. Finally, Tonkiss mentions a group of cities that had handed over urban intervention to self-regeneration by citizens³ (2013, 314).

The clear message conveyed by this diversity of attitudes is that reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches remains a pending task for institutional urban planning. It is, on the other hand, an unavoidable issue, not only because neoliberal policies are far from waning but also because the flexibility of institutional urban planning is a sine qua non condition for the contemporary city. It requires tools that can adapt to the changing circumstances driven by a context of cyclical crises.

At this stage, the question is: what can institutional urban planning learn from bottom-up urbanism? We will attempt to answer this question by highlighting the five significant contributions of the latter to the urban planning discourse of the past decade: the discovery of new tactics, new times, new locations, new processes, and a new aesthetic.

new tactics:
from the city as a scientific fact to the city as a social fact

As for new tactics, they have been emphasized within the context of a general and conceptual critique of the scientism and technicism that guide institutional urban planning. The top-down approach is built upon both, as it places technicians and experts at the top of the decision-making pyramid. The criticism of reducing the city to a problem of technical rationality lies at the core of bottom-up urbanism, which understands the city primarily as a social fact. In conjunction with technicism comes regulatoryism, the use of strict and precise laws and regulations to enforce technical decisions. This leads to an over-planned and overly controlled city that offers limited space for spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, diversity, and citizen engagement. It's also a city with low resilience since regulatoryism constrains potential responses to changes in social, economic, technological, or environmental circumstances, changes that have become frequent in recent decades.

Institutional urban planning should create the conditions to accommodate the transformations resulting from climate, financial, social, and other transitions. To do this, it would require a vision that is less scientistic, less structured, more fragmented, and, above all, more flexible. As Joi Ito, former director of the MIT Media Lab, recognized, this would involve being guided by a compass rather than by masterplans, predetermined documents incapable of responding to changes induced by external phenomena (cited in Mitchell & Tang 2018, 474-2). In this sense, the major lesson from bottom-up urbanism is the choice of the tactical, the empirical, the local, and the pragmatic over the technical, the strategic, the normative, the universal, and the theoretical. Moreover, the large scale inherent in masterplans contradicts the strategy of minimal intervention, which is the way bottom-up urbanism responds rapidly and flexibly to the unexpected. Following this example, institutional urban planning should focus on seeding the city with community-scale micro-interventions, confining large-scale projects and infrastructure to the bare essentials⁴.

new times:
from the long term to the short term

The second significant contribution of bottom-up urbanism to the contemporary urban planning discourse has been the realization of the importance of the ephemeral in the city-building process. This involves using strategies to wait during periods of economic crisis or bureaucratic processing (referred to as "meanwhile uses") and injecting vitality into the city through temporary events (known as "pop-up uses"). These temporary uses provide the flexibility that is essential for a resilient city, enabling it to adapt to the changes that unfold during transitional phases (Fig. 1).

Figure 1_ Mercato Metropolitano (London). "Meanwhile use" on a site awaiting construction. Source: photo by the author.

Institutional urban planning should embrace this new temporality in several ways. Firstly, it should refrain from defining long-term projects, as contemporary uncertainty poses a risk that they may never come to fruition. Instead, it should focus on setting flexible future intentions and concrete short to medium-term projects, as advocated by Maurice Mitchell and Bo Tang: "Prediction should be considered to be akin to a weather forecast, which is based on current temperatures, wind speed and direction, but with a limited certainty of a precise outcome at a particular place and time" (2018, 494). One strategy to put this vision into practice is to divide urban interventions into limited time periods and associate them with sets of small, cost-effective, and adaptable actions, with the awareness that the outcomes of one phase will impact the subsequent ones. To minimize risks, the proposed actions need to be experimental and reversible, allowing for a return to the previous state in case of failure. Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams refer to this planning as "four-dimensional planning" since it involves planning the temporal dimension of the city in addition to its three physical dimensions (2012, 182).

Additionally, institutional urban planning should establish legal frameworks and streamline spatial arrangements to support the implementation of temporary land uses in both public spaces and vacant lots. Incorporating temporary uses in public spaces allows for a blend of formal and informal activities, fostering spatial intensity that aligns with the city's resilience-oriented vision. Concerning vacant lots, temporary uses can unlock the potential of underutilized areas that might not attract private initiatives. They can also address social needs that may not generate commercial profits, such as community sports facilities and charitable initiatives. Lastly, they offer immediate benefits to the community, which is particularly valuable when it comes to essential services.

Making space for temporary uses questions another key tool of institutional urban planning: zoning. The idea here would be to replace the strict functionalism that guides it with "flexible zoning," where land uses could be modified without the need for lengthy legal processes. City plans could even include the definition of "tolerance zones" where informal and spontaneous unplanned uses would be allowed, and things could simply happen.

new places:
from generating the city to repairing the city

The exploration of new urban spaces is another significant contribution from bottom-up urbanism. It has been particularly intriguing to rediscover the value of vacant or underused areas within the city, often referred to as "cracks," where austerity-driven urban development tends to take place: these areas include parking lots, outdated infrastructure, neglected vacant lots, decaying buildings, landfills, and more (Fig. 2). Urban land is a finite resource, making it crucial to emphasize the activation of these spaces and the overall intensification of land use. In line with the philosophy of minimal intervention, the emphasis should be on "repairing the city" rather than "generating it."

Figure 2_ Brick Lane (London). Utilizing a parking lot as a food court during weekends. Source: photo by the author.

This would require institutional urban planning to make a selection of the areas where interventions are allowed, encouraging the discovery of opportunities in unexpected but suitable areas to accommodate activities difficult to place within the speculative contemporary real estate market. Institutional urban planning should establish mechanisms that enable vacant or underutilized areas to host planned or spontaneous everyday activities, whether permanent or ephemeral. Areas located under major urban infrastructures such as elevated highways or railways could be suitable for hosting markets, educational workshops, or slow zones. This would also promote the efficient use of available urban space by enhancing its functionality through the addition of compatible uses. Sidewalks could serve as extensions of neighboring businesses (Fig. 3); parking lots could be transformed into food markets with food trucks during off-peak times, and vacant lots and residual spaces could be repurposed as gardens or green areas.

Figure 3_ Peckham (London). Sidewalks used as a commercial expansion zone. Source: photo by the author.

new processes:
from focusing on the outcome to opting for the place-shaping continuum

The fourth contribution of bottom-up urbanism, new processes, is central to the issue of agents since they are who implement either the top-down or bottom-up approach. In this regard, their contribution has been to emphasize the process over the outcome. The actions of bottom-up urbanism involve collective endeavors that evolve gradually following a predefined protocol. Often, the innovation lies more in this protocol than in the final outcome, which may sometimes result in mediocre forms or limited functionality. The importance of these actions also lies in the process, as it serves to foster a sense of community or to educate it in resilience. This strategy, which places emphasis on the design and creation processes rather than the resulting spaces, represents a true paradigm shift from traditional urban planning.

In the article "The Place-shaping Continuum: A Theory of Urban Design Process," Matthew Carmona applies this paradigm shift to the field of urban design, which he defines as a "place-shaping continuum," "an on-going journey through which places are continuously shaped and re-shaped—physically, socially and economically— through periodic planned intervention, day-to-day occupation and the long-term guardianship of place" (2014, 34). According to Carmona, place-shaping is informed by local traditions of city-making, determined by the contemporary political-economic context, and shaped by the power relationships established among the agents involved in the process (urban designers, developers, investors, public administrations, managers, residents, etc.). These three variables condition four subprocesses: design, development, use, and management.

In the first sub-process, Shaping through Design, Carmona identifies innovation as an active agent, referring to the fixation of urban designers educated in the modernist tradition on avant-garde art. Carmona cautions against the futility of this agent: "In general, however, design innovation of itself seemed to be of little consequence to public space users, with some of the simplest design solutions delivering the greatest positive impact, whilst innovation was most successful when focusing on the use of space rather than its style" (2014, 17). In this context, bottom-up urban design should concentrate on addressing technical and functional issues rather than striving for innovation by introducing artistic and intellectual elements into urban spaces, which are often incomprehensible to the public, leading to a lack of resonance with users. The second sub-process in the urban design, as a place-shaping continuum, is Shaping through Development. As Carmona explains, this phase is determined by the agent who leads and coordinates it. They must initiate the project, garner community support, secure resources, navigate administrative procedures, and oversee the construction phase. Three sectors play a role here: the public, the private, and the community/voluntary sector, often referred to as the "third sector." In principle, it may seem that the development of a bottom-up urban design should be led by the third sector, by nonprofit volunteers selected by the community. However, Carmona is highly skeptical of this option, which tends to be idealized:

The diversity of London's communities (such as its spaces) is a feature of development processes across the city. These vary from largely apathetic communities (for varied and complex reasons) who have to be coaxed through formal consultation processes into making any contribution at all, to highly active (generally well-off) communities that are highly capable of de-railing projects if proposals are not in their narrow interests. In the main, therefore, the role of communities is largely reactive or negative; reacting to proposals already made for spaces, sometimes voting on a beauty parade of options, or actively campaigning against projects (2014, 21).

The following two sub-processes identified by Carmona, Shaping through Use and Shaping through Management, extend urban design beyond the point where professionals traditionally consider it finished, which typically occurs upon the project's inauguration. However, what begins at this stage—the utilization and management of public space—is crucial for the resilience of the built environment, which must adapt to changing circumstances. Carmona concludes the section dedicated to the Use sub-process with two parameters that emphasize its open-ended nature: the adaptation of urban space to change and its appropriation by different groups and for various purposes. Both point to the essence of resilience, to change, which should not be hindered but encouraged. With this in mind, bottom-up urban design should champion the issue of temporality, promoting ephemeral installations such as pop-up businesses, markets, or nomadic gardens, using demountable structures, rollable pavements, or urban furniture containers (Fig. 4). The ephemeral as a facilitator of change in a transition process. Furthermore, as noted by Bishop and Williams: "an intention to be short-lived could also suggest a desire to leave minimal traces on earth" (2012, 214).

Figure 4_ Skip Garden (London). Temporary garden installed during the construction phase of the King's Cross urban complex. Source: photo by the author.

The fourth and final sub-process of the place-shaping continuum is Shaping through Management. This is the longest-term task and should be entrusted to community self-management. Residents would be responsible for defining a program of activities (such as concerts, fairs, exhibitions, religious celebrations, artistic events, markets, etc.) to ensure that the urban space defined according to the principles of bottom-up urban design becomes a neighborhood hub where the community can meet and interact.

new aesthetics:
from activism to gentrification

The fifth contribution of bottom-up urbanism has been a new aesthetic. Indeed, much of its appeal to students and young architects can be attributed to this fact. Their designs are informal, fun, fresh, open, provocative, irreverent, and decidedly unorthodox. The tremendous creativity displayed in these bottom-up interventions has led some authors to associate them with the discourse of the creative city. This discourse was initiated by Charles Landry in the 1990s and later popularized by Richard Florida with the concept of the "creative class." After decades of critique from critical theory, the concept of the creative city is now often seen as a cultural expression of the neoliberal socioeconomic model.

The aesthetics of bottom-up urbanism align with this cultural expression. They frequently use materials such as laminated wood, synthetic tarps, artificial turf, scaffolding pipes, sand, sawdust, and various types of paints (acrylic, reflective, spray, etc.). These materials are typically applied or assembled using artisanal techniques, often by the residents themselves in a DIY fashion. They also commonly utilize recycled or donated objects, including umbrellas, folding tables and chairs, water tanks, packing crates, tires, bales of straw, concrete blocks, drums, bollards, traffic cones, and the stars of the bottom-up aesthetic: pallets and shipping containers (Fig. 5).

Figure 5_ Containerville (London). Office building constructed using shipping containers. Source: photo by the author.

All of these everyday and familiar elements, mainly lightweight and portable, modest and affordable, are typically found in the "third places" where the creative class gathers. Zardini argues that the aesthetics of bottom-up urbanism aim to: "propose alternative lifestyles, reinvent our daily lives, and reoccupy urban space with new uses" (cited in Stevens & Dovey 2019, 331). In other words, to spatially express a certain lifestyle. Anthony García himself acknowledged that one of the contemporary trends fueling the boom of tactical urbanism was the demographic shift, which includes the creative class: "Those communities tend to be a little more educated, higher income possibly. One of the challenges with this idea is that volunteers need free time to make these projects happen. So there's an unspoken prerequisite that you need to have the capacity of an engaged community" (Steuteville 2017).

Paradoxically, the aesthetic celebration has ended up prevailing over the insurgent and combative rhetoric with which the bottom-up urbanisms began their journey back in the 1970s. Their revolutionary component got lost along the way in favor of convergence with the interests of neoliberalism and the new economy. Nowadays, the creative class finds that rule-breaking something very cool, although it has been reduced to the exercise of minor infractions (painting on the asphalt, installing furniture in public space, etc.) that are usually tolerated or, at most, that result in a fine easily affordable for them.

All of the above explains why the preferred scenario for bottom-up urbanisms are gentrified neighborhoods located in urban centers, the so-called "cool neighborhoods." In a study of their actions in the United States, Gordon C. C. Douglas found that bottom-up actions were much more common in this kind of neighborhoods, and that most of the neighbors involved in their design, execution, and management processes belonged to the creative class (2014, 18). In the words of Mike Lydon: "This has occurred while more and more people— especially the young and well educated—have continued to move into once forlorn walkable neighborhoods" (2012, 3). Certain authors, often from the field of critical theory, go so far as to regard bottom-up urbanisms as a tool for gentrification that aligns with neoliberal strategies for urban revitalization. The aesthetic associated to the creative class draws in middle and upper-middle-class individuals, who are captivated by the cosmopolitan, progressive, and avant-garde atmosphere found in locations where bottom-up urbanisms are implemented (Fig. 6).

Figure 6_ King's Cross (London). Floating bookstore with a bottom-up aesthetic in a highly gentrified area. Source: photo by the author.

epilogue

New tactics, new times, new places, new processes, and a new aesthetics. These would be the five main contributions that bottom-up urbanism has brought to the contemporary urban planning debate over the last forty years. In these four decades, institutional urban planning, consecrated by European social democratic governments after World War II, has entered a systemic crisis.

While bottom-up urbanism could assist in addressing these issues, it is clear that it cannot entirely supplant institutional urban planning. The processes of transformation in contemporary cities are highly intricate, involving a multitude of factors and interests that bottom-up urbanism cannot comprehensively address. Nevertheless, in the context of economic and social uncertainty experienced over the past decades, the nimble interstitial practices of the bottom-up approach have illuminated the deficiencies of traditional, bureaucratic, and inflexible institutional urban planning. The most significant of these deficiencies is its lack of resilience, its inability to adapt to changes, which is especially problematic in the dynamic period we have experienced since the 1970s, marked by a sequence of various crises (environmental, economic, health-related). In this context, the need for reinvention is imperative, and a good starting point would be the five major contributions of bottom-up urbanism that have been outlined in this article.

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