The Atlantic:

“DIY Mapping Goes Mainstream

Last summer, we wrote about a DIY aerial mapmaking kit from The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science that enables anyone with $95, a camera, and some helium to become a citizen cartographer. The project empowers people to document events (oil spills, Occupy protests) that official mapmakers might overlook. But this kind of grassroots aerial surveying (distinct from other forms of grassroots mapping) also has another benefit: It produces bird’s-eye images that are sharper and more beautiful than airplanes and satellites can capture.

To that end, a cache of more than 100 maps from the Public Lab project have now been incorporated into Google Earth itself, signaling some nice recognition of rogue mappers (and their DIY data) by the biggest commercial behemoth in the field. If you happen to stumble in your Google Earth wanders across a patch of surprisingly high-resolution landscape, you may be looking at a Public Lab contribution. Or, if you want to go looking for these images with a little less happenstance, you can also find all of them indexed in this Google Earth KML file.”

Photo: Google Earth

“ TALKING TACTICAL URBANISM

Branden Klayko

As interest in urban planning surges across the country, Mike Lydon discusses the small changes that make a big difference.

Everyone can be an urban planner, and that’s a good thing, according to Mike Lydon, principal at Brooklyn’s Street Plans Collaborative and author of Tactical Urbanism, Volume 2. With a surge of interest in urbanism across the country and at every level, communities are rethinking public space, or the lack therein. Into the breach, so-called tactical urbanism has surged, offering quick, affordable tools for making a big impact. Lydon and other tactical urbanists will be contributing to the U.S. Pavilion’s Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good at the 13th Venice Biennale in August. AN gets a jump on the conversation:

The Architect’s Newspaper: How does tactical urbanism differ from traditional forms of urbanism? How did you get involved with the movement?

Mike Lydon: In 2010, I began noticing a lot of little things happening that were, in a lot of ways, self-funded or self-organized but having a big, longer-term impact. One of the flagship examples of tactical urbanism, Build a Better Block, which started in Dallas, was just a weekend event. Essentially it put a three-lane one-way street on a road diet—adding chicanes [bump outs] and a bike lane. They visually mocked up an environment, a neighborhood setting, that the community wanted. The result was huge. It rippled all across the Internet and produced actual change in the city of Dallas itself.

After seeing that, I started looking for similar efforts—both bottom-up and top-down—and it was clear people were being really creative in making physical changes in their neighborhoods. New York City is the great example of public space reclamation. Using very temporary materials in plazas and public spaces built literally overnight, [those plazas] became these placeholders that are very highly used. Now we’re seeing some of them up for permanent design and construction. That process is what’s fascinating and what I have been very interested in trying to document.

What is the value of this tactical approach?

A lot of these efforts are not expensive. Really, $2,000 can help people envision change. What’s difficult about the traditional planning process is that it’s behind closed doors. It can be intimidating for people to get involved, but if you’re experimenting with change in real time on the street, on your block, or on your sidewalk, people get a real understanding of what that means. Especially when it’s part of the larger planning process. You can mock it up, and it becomes a type of rendering in real time. People can say, “This really works for me. I like it.”

What are the tactical urbanism projects that have achieved long-term success?

Open Streets [Appropriating a street for non-automotive uses] is one of the most successful that’s out there. We’ve been documenting Open Streets programs around the country as part of the Open Streets Project. There are now 70, from very small towns to large cities like New York, Chicago, and LA. It’s something that can be scaled to each individual town and it touches on a number of issues facing communities, from public health and community exercise to developing discussions around making cities more pedestrian and bike friendly. Businesses tend to do very well during Open Streets, so it’s good for the economy, too.

Build a Better Block and all its variations is also a very good tactic. It’s basically a neighborhood barn raising. People really get together and volunteer time for a week-long or weekend-long event during which they mock up what they want to see on the block.” 

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: REPURPOSED DUMPSTERS DEFINE SAN FRANCISCO’S SHOWPLACE TRIANGLE PEDESTRIAN PLAZA, DESIGNED BY REBAR GROUP IN 2009. JEREMY A. SHAW/FLICKR

“Stop thinking big

Forget stadiums: Let’s build a pop-up park. Smart cities know the future is cooler, cheaper — and smaller

Will Doig. June 16, 2012

Last week, a press release from Chicago’s Office of the Mayor proclaimed something that would have sounded like a Yes Men prank just a few years ago: Rahm Emanuel, it said, has a plan to get rid of the city’s “excess asphalt.”

It wasn’t a proposal for a big new park or recreational facility, but a plan to take little bits of public space here and there — streets, parking spots, alleyways — and turn them into places for people. It was the latest example of a municipal government taking an active role in tactical urbanism, that low-cost, low-commitment, incremental approach to city building — the “let’s not build a stadium” strategy.

For a long time, tactical urbanism was associated with guerrilla gardeners and fly-by-night pop-up parks, whereas large-scale “city planning” was seen as the job of bureaucrats with blueprints. But more and more often, City Hall is taking a more active (as opposed to purely reactive) role in these types of smaller, cheaper, localized efforts, and sometimes even leading them. “Tactical urbanism has always been a combination of both bottom-up and top-down,” says Mike Lydon, a principal at the Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, “but now you’re seeing more of these ideas proliferate at the municipal level.”

In a way, thinking small is the next logical step in America’s urban renaissance. When cities really started changing 10 or 15 years ago, the economy was booming and the Internet was a newfangled gizmo. Today, cities have less money but more ways to communicate, two conditions perfectly suited to more focused, low-cost planning. Now you can home in on a specific neighborhood (or even just a few blocks), find out what the residents there want or need, cheaply implement it on a trial basis, and make it permanent if it works.”

Via: Salon

Image: Lorelyn Medina via Shutterstock/Salon

“The Street Hacker, Officially Embraced

EMILY BADGER MAY 07, 2012.

Inside the civic digital space, anyone can download a public dataset, build an app, share it with others. There are no permit fees, no regulations to research, no paperwork to file. You don’t have to trudge to City Hall. Everything is (or at least, it should be) open.

In this way, the digital world is vastly different from the physical one. Want to make use of a transit dataset at a hackathon? Have at it. But want to hack the physical space at the actual train station, maybe plant a few flowers, throw up a bike rack? Well, good luck with that.

The explosive growth of the open-data movement has taught a generation of city-dwellers that they have a right to peek behind the curtain of local government, to identify civic problems and help solve them, too. In the digital world, that means the relationship between city governments and residents has been shifting for a few years now. But what happens when these newly engaged citizens want to have an equally hands-on role with the physical space in our cities, with our streets and sidewalks and public parks? Could cities make it just as easy to hack the physical world as the digital one?

Maybe this sounds a little abstract. But there are many examples – not all of them legal – of creative citizens already tinkering with public space. The most well-known is probably Park(ing) Day. The project started in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco-based art and design studio, converted a single metered parking spot in the city into an impromptu public park. Since then, the idea has evolved into an international movement, with citizens reclaiming parking spots in more than 150 cities on six continents for Parking(ing) Day last September. Rebar now calls this “an open-source global event,” borrowing from the language of hackathons.

“A lot of us have one foot in each of these communities,” says Jake Levitas, the research director for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. The foundation works primarily to promote creative technology and digital culture, but Levitas often talks with friends at Rebar who might better be described as hackers of the built environment. “I realized how much we were speaking the same language,” Levitas says. “The whole DIY urbanism community, if you change two words out of everything that they say, it’s the exact same as the urban hacker, the civic hacker, the technology community. It’s very much DIY, very much taking the city into your own hands, with new forms of civic participation.”

The open-data movement, from which many of these ideas are migrating, is really only a few years old. But the fact that it has taken root so quickly – with city governments all over the country now welcoming civic hackers and turning problems over to them – suggests we might see the same kind of spreading popularity and official embrace of DIY urbanism.

“Last year, hackathons weren’t on the political agenda, and now we’re hearing from the mayor’s office like, ‘a cat got stuck in a tree, can we have a hackathon to get it down?’” Levitas laughs. “We’re excited to do the same thing for this area, blending the physical and digital as forms of civic participation.”

The challenge, though, is that this is all much harder to do in the real world. Even converting a street into a block party, a fairly old idea, requires in most cities months of  of planning and plenty of paperwork. And city code at least understands a “block party.” Most cities have no idea what to do with parklets, pop-up playgrounds, or quirky street furniture.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Rebar Group

“The Accidental DIY Developer

David Lepeska. March 26, 2012.

Earlier this month, Chicago artist Theaster Gates invited a couple dozen locals over for a soul food dinner at one of three South Side houses he’s rehabbed with the help of friends and a good deal of recycled materials. Collectively known as theDorchester Projects, the renovated spaces have sparked a minor cultural renaissance in the long-neglected Grand Crossing neighborhood and become Exhibit A in Gates’ mini-empire of urban revitalization.

“The larger cultural community has become excited about Dorchester,” Gates says moments before his guests arrive, “and the dinner table becomes a way of not only connecting people socially but creating new opportunities between people where there’s need.”  

The 38-year-old Gates is a fast-rising artist, known for re-purposed sculptures and curated events that often reference black history and political engagement. His work appeared in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and, last year, in a 40 Under 40 show at a Smithsonian gallery. This year, he served as the commissioned artist for the Armory Show in New York.

He’s also developed, almost by accident, an innovative, arts-focused model of redevelopment that’s expanding across the Midwest.

The story begins in 2006, when Gates bought a derelict former candy store in Grand Crossing, just south of the University of Chicago, where he’d accepted a job to promote arts engagement with the local community. By the time he’d rehabbed the space and moved in a few years later, his career as an artist had taken off and the housing crisis had punched the low-income neighborhood in the nose.

Grand Crossing’s population declined by more than 15 percent between 2000 to 2010, according to the latest census. But rather than leave, Gates tripled down, taking advantage of depressed prices to buy the dilapidated house next door, an adjacent lot and a duplex across the street. One house became an archive and library for thousands of architecture and design books as well as an artist residence.

Another became a cinema space and a third a music listening venue, with thousands of vinyl records. Gates organized live performances, summer programs for neighborhood youth and, this spring, a series of ritualized Soul Food Dinners, which are part of the Feast exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum.

To manage and maintain the Dorchester Projects, Gates created the Rebuild Foundation in 2010. A team of artists, architects, educators, developers and activists, Rebuild has since taken over and begun redeveloping nine buildings in distressed neighborhoods in Omaha, Detroit and St Louis. The completed spaces will include a soul food restaurant, a pottery studio and several artist and performance spaces, as well as residences.

Plenty of hybrid art spaces across the country, such as Machine Project in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, mix gallery shows with disparate events like cheese tastings and scientific experiments. But the Rebuild Foundation appears to be the only arts-centered, multi-city urban revitalization organization in the country. Gates, who holds a master’s in ceramics, religious studies and urban planning from Iowa State, aims to disprove those who believe artists can’t live and thrive in distressed neighborhoods like Grand Crossing.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: Landon Bone Baker