The Everyday in the Design of Our Neighborhoods, an Interview with Margaret Crawford

Carlos García Vázquez

ccggvv@us.es

Universidad de Sevilla, España

Camilo Salazar Ferro

csalazar@uniandes.edu.co

Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Juanita Fonseca

j.fonseca33@uniandes.edu.co

Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Margaret Crawford is an Architecture and Urban Design Professor at Berkeley College of Environmental Design and runs the Urban Design program there. The Master's Studio is running a major five-year project with community partners from rural areas in the Salinas Valley. In the teaching program of our architecture courses, we incorporated Margaret Crawford's article "Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life" from the book Everyday Urbanism, which she co-edited with John Kaliski and John Chase. The book invited us to explore the discourse developed within it by conducting our own experiments. We worked with our students to develop an awareness of everyday life and how it relates to our urban space. This issue on Bottom-up Urbanisms seemed like the correct place to host her ideas. In the way she expresses herself, and through the everyday examples she provides, Margaret Crawford conveys the continuing simplicity and validity of Everyday Urbanism that has continued until today and is seeping into our Latin American contexts.

At the time when you first published Everyday Urbanism, in 1999, what was the context? What led you to publish the book?

Margaret Crawford: This is a great question because, during the 1990s, John Kaliski, John Chase and I were very interested in urban design because of its engagement with the public sphere. But in Los Angeles and in the US in general, there were only two approaches. One was New Urbanism, which basically said that everything in Los Angeles was wrong and needed to be completely reconfigured according to its principles. The other school was the avant-garde Peter Eisenman approach, which consisted of layering maps and different elements to create a new form for urban designs. This was purely paper architecture that could rarely be built.

But when we drove the streets of LA, what we saw was incredible. For example, an oil change and body shop that becomes a taco stand at six o'clock with families eating outside. We just saw so many amazing uses of space that we couldn't believe that any of these urban designers actually lived in the same city! Because they didn't even notice what was happening around them.

How did you introduce the idea? Because in an architecture school nobody tells you how to look at everyday life and value it.

MC: We employed a little bit of trickery. At that time, our SCI-Arc students tended to be somewhat pretentious, so we framed the concept of Everydayness using French philosophers to make it acceptable. We chose the word everyday and opted for the everyday lens because other words, such as informal, created a binary opposition to formal. This suggested that the two poles weren't interacting, though we knew that, in practice, they were. So, we didn't want to get bogged down in that discussion.

Everyday life is such a rich topic and lends itself to the analysis of people's lives. One of our goals was to bring human beings back into the architectural and urban discussion. In design discourse in the US, thinking about people had been off the table since the 1960s. The human-centered concepts of the 1960s were rooted in generalizing social science approaches. So, the idea of the everyday seemed a perfect lens to use. Its extensive philosophical background in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau made it acceptable. We asked students to read difficult theoretical texts in order to make looking at ordinary things a legitimate activity for them.

Where do you position Everyday Urbanism in the contemporary debate on Bottom-Up Urbanism? And what would be the differences between it and Tactical Urbanism, as well as its similarities?

MC: That is an interesting question! Tactical Urbanism is really top-down but from the lowest rung of the top. It's a very useful way of approaching urban interventions. The people who use Tactical Urbanism are usually planners or people who have a professional interest in small-scale urbanism. These people are usually the active agents of Tactical Planning. Tactical Planning is a useful concept: try something out and see if it works before you make it permanent.

But Everyday Urbanism is very different. It focuses on the ordinary people in the street and what they do. That is where it gets its inspiration. That is the basis of Everyday Urbanism. It can be applied not only to poor, marginal people but also to middle-class urbanism. Certainly, in the US, everyday middle-class life is not very well served. Students always ask, why are you so concerned about street vendors and immigrants and poor people? Living in a state like California, where we have many immigrants and the most extreme social inequality in the United States, I am personally and politically concerned about these people. But if you look at many suburban areas, everyday life could also be improved in many ways. So, Everyday Urbanism is a broad concept.

But in our book, we used it in a narrower way. That was fine because legitimizing the everyday practices of the poor and immigrants was and is an urgent issue. In California, many of the everyday practices we highlight have now been legalized. For example, street vendors became legal in Los Angeles in 2018, and in 2020, backyard restaurants were permitted in the whole of California. However, the problem is that out of the 20,000 street vendors in Los Angeles, only 200 are actually legal. This is because the permit process is expensive and difficult. It turns out that legalization is not the solution. It's just the first step.

We recall a comment from a student who said that sometimes Tactical Urbanism seems like another form of gentrification.

MC: I agree with that. I don't think it's coincidental that Tactical Urbanism, the book written by Anthony Garcia and Mike Lydon, was sponsored and published by the Congress for the New Urbanism. The approach fits very well into their New Urbanist framework. However, for municipal planners, it can be a useful tool or technique among all the others they use to demonstrate and understand whether some changes can work or not.

Everyday Urbanism vindicates the routine activities of daily life, the artifacts that make these possible, and the spaces where they take place. So, what purpose does this championing of the everyday serve in the contemporary city?

MC: Although the book Everyday Urbanism focused on the poor and immigrants, it also included middle-class examples. I believe that Everyday Urbanism is an approach that can be applied anywhere. For example, I live in a very beautiful residential neighborhood in Berkeley, but in order to buy a loaf of bread or anything else, you have to get in your car and drive down the hill. But in Berkeley, in the early part of the 20th century, there were many little corner stores in residential neighborhoods. If they could be re-introduced into our middle-class neighborhood, our daily life would be incomparably better. People would purchase their daily needs, have a coffee, and even meet their neighbors there. So, I feel that this is a framework that is very applicable to many different kinds of people and many kinds of spaces.

I just had dinner with some former students from Mexico City. They were telling me about their daily life, which is very much defined by security issues. They described their luxury apartment building, which did not have a pedestrian entrance. The architect never imagined that a resident would be coming in the front door on foot but only entering in a car through the security gate to the parking area. This is a highly restrictive kind of urbanism.

When you start looking at people's everyday lives, it almost always illuminates much larger issues. Why don't we have corner stores here in my neighborhood? Because this is a zoned residential area. In fact, Berkeley was the first city in the US to impose zoning. Just starting to think about the single issue of buying a loaf of bread on foot, you begin to understand the history of zoning and its very negative issues. Everyday life opens the door to understanding much larger issues about the city, how it's governed, its history, and everything else.

What are your thoughts on official urban planning, and what could Everyday Urbanism contribute to it? The book's introduction mentions ‘dialogism’ as a tool for Everyday Urbanism. Do you stand by this, or has this concept evolved? And how can it be applied to urban planning?

MC: I have been reflecting on this. I gave a talk at the Bartlett School in London this summer. I gave wonderful examples of Everyday Urbanism from everywhere, and people found them compelling. But this was a planning school, so they raised a lot of questions: “Yes, but...what if somebody has a barbecue restaurant in their backyard? Isn't the next-door neighbor going to complain? How can the city regulate this?” In Everyday Urbanism, we discuss the concept of ‘dialogism’. This is important for conceptualizing the conflicts that always emerge in planning because it acknowledges that different voices and different conclusions can all exist at the same time. Even if one of these voices is going to win, acknowledging that other positions still exist and have the right to exist is really important.

The idea of dialogism comes from the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of the 19th-century novel, whose protagonists all have very different understandings of the world. Rather than trying to resolve them, the novelist allows them all to coexist, creating richness. In contrast, many people involved in planning struggles see the process as a zero-sum game where one side must prevail. Any urban planning proposal will encounter opposition and struggle. As a result, many urban planners see their role as that of mediators.

Instead, it should be possible to adopt a more nuanced and flexible approach so that one solution could prevail here but not there in different situations. This means that planning should have multiplicity instead of the singularity it currently relies on. I think the problem with planning is that it wants generalizations and "best" practices. It wants concepts that will apply to all situations, while I believe that multiplicity and specificity are what is most important.

Student activists at Berkeley want to make Telegraph Avenue, right by the university, into a bike and pedestrian-friendly street. A mile and a half away, there's another street that they also want to turn over to bike paths. That neighborhood is a completely different place, with an entirely different population. But their ideology is inflexible. I believe in flexible regulation and flexible planning appropriate to specific situations. Unfortunately, planning education does not teach this; it's about generalizing solutions. And that is where, in my opinion, planners and even activists go wrong: the problem is their conceptual framework.

In what way do you consider that Everyday Urbanism could be applied to contribute to the quality of life in Latin American cities, which are undergoing constant change and continue to host dramatic migratory processes?

MC: In situations of change brought about by migration, you need flexible regulation. You need flexible planning that can constantly and creatively respond to these new challenges. Today, in most cities across the globe, migration is the new permanent situation. It's easy to regulate but hard to de-regulate, so regulations need to take new, more fluid forms.

I was in Europe this summer and was struck that every city seemed to be following the same planning model. They all have bike paths, pedestrianization, fewer cars, and lovely streetscape improvements. They are beautiful. But there are other things going on in these cities that I feel are more important. Who was there to appreciate these beautiful improvements? Primarily tourists and people who have the money to live in astronomically expensive city centers. Where are the migrants? On the periphery, along with everybody else who can't afford the center. In a lot of different places, the most important phenomenon today is migration. People are moving everywhere. Urbanism has not responded to this new condition well.

Every year in our Urban Design program, we have students who want to focus on migration as their thesis problem. But honestly, as urban designers, we don't know how to deal with this. It's very complicated, yet it's a burning issue. Migration is an important urban concern everywhere, yet how do we think about it? To me, that's the place where creativity, flexibility and innovation could really manifest themselves.

I'm not that familiar with Latin America. But I'm sure that every country has its own highly specific circumstances that respond to the general condition of migration. That kind of specificity is important!

Since you mentioned European cities, where the 15-minute city approach has been very influential, we believe it's important to discuss this. As a matter of fact, in Bogotá, the city planning office is currently applying the approach, as are other cities in Colombia.

MC: I don't want to totally dismiss the 15-minute city because, in a way, there is an overlap with Everyday Urbanism in the sense that the approach is based on people's lives. The problem—and it doesn't need to be a problem—is that the 15-minute city is closely associated with a very particular kind of European urban form, exemplified by central neighborhoods in Paris and Barcelona.

I used to live on a residential street in Berkeley, and it was a genuine 15-minute city. You could take care of all of your daily needs on foot. But, the urban fabric consisted of a long commercial corridor with single-family houses on either side. It did not conform at all to the ideal urbanism of the 15-minute city, which is based on dense mixed-use blocks. So, if the idea of the 15-minute city could be separated from a normative urban form, it's a common-sense idea that could lead to looking at people's daily routines and trying to make them better. Instead, the concept seems to be focused on making the privileged center of Paris even better than it already is and to duplicate these exemplary cityscapes elsewhere. I know a PhD student from Barcelona. His parents live in the suburbs of Barcelona and almost never go into the city center. Their life experience raises important questions about how widely applicable these models are, even for European cities.

At some point you talked about flexibility in the city. Some movements' interventions on the street are partly built to enable community appropriation of public spaces. This approach does not follow Barcelona's model of urban design. Does it fit into the flexibility concept, or is it different?

MC: I think that kind of "universal" flexibility is very different. I'm not saying that it couldn't work, but it's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is flipping the approach. Instead of designing a flexible space, begin by asking, "What are people doing here now?" then, based on that, respond with specific designs and plans to support these activities. Appropriating public spaces can give people agency, but generic design flexibility can also put the burden on the user, [requiring them] to activate the space.

The Everyday Urbanism approach examines and values economic activities in urban spaces. This is a common practice and, in Latin America, includes a focus on informal occupancy and (in public planning terms) the misuse of public space, which in many cases leads to cohabitation conflicts, such as backyard disputes. How could this issue be addressed in a way that could benefit everyone?

MC: In my work on public space, I emphasize that one of the fundamental rights of public space is the right to livelihoods and that the street and sidewalk are economic spaces. This reframes the discussion in terms of rights, meaning more than the mere right to enjoy public space, which is what so much of the writing about the topic emphasizes. Jan Gehl, for example, supports sidewalk cafés and street performers, both activities that make the street an economic space. Yet, if a street vendor comes along to set up their cart, that economic activity does not form a part of his concept. But I don't believe that asserting these rights can necessarily benefit everyone. For example, the struggle to use the street and sidewalk as an economic space has been going on for more than 30 years in California. There have been victories and defeats.

But these struggles have involved more than just street vendors. Middle-class support is really important. For example, more than 25 years ago, the large number of day laborers on the streets of Los Angeles was considered a huge problem. For over ten years, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and Department of Sociology worked with the city, neighbors, Home Depot stores and the day laborers themselves. This produced a dialogic situation, with an outside entity—the university—adding its voice. Their participation was transformative, resulting in official city-sponsored day labor hiring sites. This acknowledged that day laborers were legitimate workers and created an organized space to hire them.

In the university, one of the most positive things we can do is add another voice to the ongoing discussions about contentious issues, making them more dialogic.

I see the university and also middle-class supporters as really important to the legitimatization of everyday activities. One of the reasons that street vending in LA became legalized was because so many middle-class hipsters became street food enthusiasts. There was an important street vendor competition, the "Vendys." A lot of high-end gourmet food trucks took part, but the winner was a woman who sold Mexico City-style quesadillas from a card table in a parking lot.

Bottom-Up Urbanisms promote creativity for problem solving. However, they are seldom studied in architecture and urbanism schools. Why do you think this is, and do you think they should be included in the curriculum? If so, how do you propose this should be done?

MC: For me, urban design is definitely the best place in the curriculum for this since urban designers work to create the public realm. Many urban design students are already very engaged in Bottom-Up Urbanism—at least our Berkeley students are. We have many international students, including students from Latin America. They are always aware and interested in bottom-up activities and will often include them in their thesis projects. American [US] students are less aware, but once they start looking around and recognize that [such activities] exist even in the wealthy Bay Area, they start to see them everywhere. It is important to include an awareness of Bottom-Up Urbanism in Architecture programs. If it is offered to them, many students become extremely interested, engage with it, and often become passionate about it. Even if they go on to have a standard professional architectural career, they will always have an interest in and remain advocates of these kinds of activities. I consider it to be a fundamental part of design education.

In many architecture programs, instructors are searching for purity. And everyday activities are about as impure as you can get. But, during my career, which has been pretty long now, I have always found students and architects who want to collaborate and provide support.

I've taught in three schools now. At SCI-Arc, I found John Kaliski and John Chase to collaborate with. Although John Chase has unfortunately died, John Kaliski has an everyday urban design firm, which, in Los Angeles, is possible. Even at the GSD, which you might think would be more invested in formal design and purity, I found very interesting collaborators who supported and participated in Everyday Urbanism. I believe that every student who took an Everyday Urbanism class or studio was changed by it. At Berkeley, students are also strongly interested in understanding how this approach works because it's about life. It's about people and those two things are usually ignored in architectural education. So, kudos to you for teaching these topics. It's wonderful!

Camilo Salazar runs an Urban Actions course in the Architecture Department, where students get to deal with everyday practices. What role do students, activists, grassroot movements, and communities have in everyday urbanism?

MC: In Los Angeles and Massachusetts, you can find many examples of grassroots movements. In Los Angeles, street vendors have a strong organization. However, it can be very tricky to engage with different groups and communities. We designed vending carts, but the vendors rejected them because of the cost and did not use them. Even so, the designs brought publicity to the issue of street vending, showing that we were connecting with and supporting the vendors. Since it's easy for architecture schools to publicize what they do, this demonstrated that we were allies of the street vendors and supported them in their concerns. So, I think that is an important avenue for collaboration.

In Chelsea, Massachusetts, we didn't work with planners but with the city government's social services and economic development departments, who were very interested in our approach. Personally, I always try to understand the local economy and include strategies to expand it and create jobs as part of my studios. In most places, you can get people from different community organizations to support you. You can almost always find somebody who is interested and who will work with you.

The university schedule is a problem because everything works on a semester basis. So, you come and go when you really want to have a long-term relationship. My Urban Design Studio is currently working in the Salinas Valley in California, a rural area dominated by agribusiness with a large Latino population. We made a five-year commitment to work there so we can engage in depth.

In terms of urban actions, what I call Guerilla Urbanism is very compelling. We have an enormous homeless population here, so I'm really astonished that architects are not building little houses to give to homeless people. A group of architects called the Mad Housers started doing this in Atlanta during the 1990s, and they are still active. Their project is excellent and important. In addition to the practical function, it shows solidarity between professionals or pre-professionals and homeless people. It has a big impact; it alerts people to the issue of homelessness and can even solve problems in a small way. I think that it's a really good thing to do. It is probably illegal, but that is a secondary issue!

Thank you, Margaret. When are you coming to visit us?

MC: I would love to come. Thank you. It's been lovely talking to you.