Abstract
Ad hoc urbanism—activities performed in public space that fall outside of the officially sanctioned uses of that space—is usually met with regulations that attempt to control or criminalize the offending actions, which de Certeau (1984) has called “‘waste products’ of a functionalist administration” (p. 94). But unsanctioned improvisatory use patterns can convey information about what people require of their public places. Instead of dismissing these uses as undesirable and erasing them from public view, landscape architects can instead reframe them as justifications for expanding or altering programs to create public spaces that provide commons to a diverse citizenry for the purposes of living, regenerating community, and asserting civic rights and responsibilities. Using news stories, case studies, and field observations, this article investigates examples of ad hoc urbanism to explore how landscape architects might accommodate their embedded meanings and expand the functionality and fairness of urban design.
SHIFTING THE FOCUS
The disruptions of 2020 and 2021 were in many ways consequences of multiple longer-term evolutions. In the United States, climate change and population growth have created and will continue to create conflict, exacerbating competition for diminishing resources—including space itself. The economic downturn of 2008 caused an uptick in lay-offs and evictions, increasing homelessness and forcing many people into temporary encampments and, in some cases, into the informal economy.
While the internet has democratized media and made it easier for individuals to organize, create social meaning, and spread messages over distances, interactions in physical space are as important as ever. The COVID-19 pandemic affirmed the essential and potential functions of outdoor public space in a democratic society. Parks received a higher level of use due to restrictions on indoor gatherings (Geng et al., 2021). Streets provided the setting for protests worldwide during the Squares Movements of 2011–2012, after the 2016 U.S. election, and as a reaction to the many instances of police brutality caught on camera phones in recent years. While homelessness in the United States appears to be declining overall since 2007, the pandemic exacerbated unsheltered homelessness (Miller, 2022). The US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2021 Annual Homeless Assessment Report states that the number of individuals with “chronic patterns of homelessness” (p. 46) increased by 20% between 2020 and 2021 even as shelters reduced capacity in accordance with physical distancing recommendations, with some communities reporting a 34% and in one case a 92% increase in unsheltered homelessness. These circumstances highlight the urgent need for public spaces as commons for living, regenerating community, asserting identity, and performing civic rights and responsibilities.
Individuals may have to adjust to changes rapidly, but conventional urban design responds slowly. At various times, outreach strategies that sideline segments of the urban population, municipal regulations, and hostile architecture have been used to control use of outdoor public space. As Sandercock (1998) has noted, the Rational Comprehensive planning model of the mid-twentieth century promoted agendas that primarily served the economic and marketing goals of cities and became normative drivers of urban design. Protocols invested the specialist, or planner-auteur, with the “objectivity to do what is best for an undifferentiated public” (p. 88), limiting those individual perspectives that make up the knowledge base of the citizenry. Instead, Sandercock argues that reality consists of multiple subjectivities and ways of knowing.
Conventional planning nomenclature can constrict the possibilities of design. Labels such as park, streetscape, corporate plaza, or parking lot convey categorical meanings and morphologies. Common understandings of these labels close off the possibility of some uses (such as sleeping, gardening, vending, or skateboarding) to privilege others (such as youth soccer, tennis, parking, and shopping). Specialized labels (e.g., “parklets” or “pop-up markets”) can signal gentrifying neighborhoods or bestow Creative City status on urban areas (Mould, 2014). Bureaucracies authorize the physical, symbolic, and ontological possibilities of public spaces where labels impose the “security of clear, definable landscapes and programs” without offering “truly joyful, inclusive and multifunctional spaces communities need or desire” (Hood, 2003, p. 34).
Official reaction to activities outside these defining lines can be uneven and insidious. Municipal regulations and policies for public space are used to control segments of the population through selective enforcement, discouraging them from participating in many aspects of public life, including using common space to meet their needs (de Certeau, 1984; Elias & Scotson, 1994; Chellew, 2016; Berglund, 2018; Ehrenfeucht & Louikaitou-Sideris, 2014). Commoning activities such as sleeping, using hydrants for bathing, or skateboarding, are branded as nuisances, health hazards, or simply visually unappealing; municipalities enlist both regulatory power and urban design aesthetics to quash them without addressing the socio-political realities and values that gave rise to them. This has led to a rise in hostile architecture: center armrests on benches, benches with tapered seats, skate stoppers, and metal spikes are now de rigueur in many urban parks and streetscapes (Chellew, 2016; Wallace, 2018). During the height of the COVID pandemic, when tent cities appeared across the United States, Los Angeles banned “sitting, sleeping and lying” at 54 public locations (Oreskes, 2021) and conducted regular “sweeps” of the Echo Park tent city, where people evicted from their houses or afraid to enter congregate shelters could take refuge (Fedigan-Linton, 2020).
This article explores the role of landscape architects in facilitating social justice in the design of public space. Instead of criminalizing or erasing unsanctioned activities, landscape architects might read and interpret them and their traces as important communicative acts. The article asks how, if small everyday resistances of ad hoc urbanism have meaning, landscape architects might apply these meanings to create public spaces that meet the needs of a more diverse citizenry and pave the way for a more responsive, just, and respectful designed future.
SEEING AD HOC URBANISM IN PUBLIC SPACE
Ad hoc urbanism is a loose term encompassing an array of activities that fall outside the norms, expectations, and rules of a particular place or jurisdiction. Activities may be performative, such as marches and protests, and leave no sign on the landscape after the performance is over. More often, though, they may be observed by physical traces such as desire lines, informal art and graffiti, messages, memorials, and trash. Related neologisms include informal, guerrilla, DIY or tactical urbanism, “making do,” autonomous geographies, or subaltern urbanism, the last of which Roy (2011) defines as “accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics” (p. 223). These terms (whose definitions are still undergoing refinement by contemporary academics and urban activists) may be distinguished by purpose, actor, scale, or outcome. Informal urbanism, like subaltern urbanism, generally refers to street vending and day work, the resort of marginalized populations excluded from the mainstream economy (Mukhija & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014). Examples of tactical and DIY urbanism—parking day, festivals, pop up games or art workshops, guerrilla gardens—are understood to be activist-led and directed by people with social or political agendas. Critics of tactical and DIY urbanism have argued that these are activities of the privileged, assailable to co-optation and subsumption by the very corporate and governmental structures against which they were initially conceived (Mould, 2014), or that they are taking on roles that government should be obligated to perform. For example, Hou (2020) distinguishes tactical urbanism, a “normative and even fashionable component of the technocratic repertoire,” from insurgent or guerrilla urbanism, a “form of counter-hegemonic spatial practices, distinct from its professionalized and institutionalized counterpart” (p. 118).
Ad hoc urbanism comprises small actions in the spirit of guerilla urbanism—a sticker, an alley lined with chewing gum, a truck hauling a grill into a park, a tent erected in the corner of a park—which speak to an endless supply of small resistances. Even if they do not rise to the level of requiring a design response, they still provide texture in the general understanding of city life. At the same time, it also contains activities that do not suggest a purposeful violation of rules. For instance, sleeping, washing, or going to the bathroom in public space doesn’t necessarily indicate rebellion, especially where the person engaging in such activities has no other choice. The term “ad hoc” is meant to encompass both intentional subordination and the mis-placed activities of daily life by nonactivists, whose motivations are more personal and possibly more urgent. They present evidence of what Fung (2006) calls “important communicative acts such as storytelling, rhetoric, and expressions of need” (p. 123). These improvisations for surviving and thriving, sometimes in concert but often in conflict with the law, defy the expectations and norms of that locality. Unlike tactical urbanists, urban tacticians do not have recourse to the safety of a group or the rhetoric of a social movement to legitimize themselves and their interactions with the landscape.
Public space may be defined in different ways, but for the purposes of this discussion, any reference to “public space” means outdoor spaces owned and managed by means of collected taxes and which are fully or partially accessible to the public, or corporate-owned but publicly accessible parks and plazas, such as Zuccotti Park in New York or Levi Plaza in San Francisco. Parks, plazas, and streets are where the most important and arguably the best illustrations of ad hoc urbanism exist: where strangers meet and interact, where conflict may occur (Parkinson, 2012), where the possibilities of existence are broad yet the expectations of behavior are narrow.
It is important to ask what is lost when landscape architects disregard the signs of improper use of a site. Karl Linn (1969) wrote that “people are alienated from their physical environment if they are unable to leave their personal imprints on their immediate surroundings” (p. 65). Does erasing ad hoc activity lead to a denial of these resistances? Does it further diminish the marginalized populations that have something to gain by enacting such resistances? As Soja (2010) argues, the impossibility of two material objects inhabiting the same physical space at the same time induces uneven development and inequality. Public space not only manifests injustice but also mirrors it. One way governmental, corporate, or other actors working from positions of power weaponize or erase otherness may be seen in the norms with which public places are planned, designed, and managed. Land managers remove evidence of habitation the state does not want to see, while members of law enforcement remove the people inhabiting public space. Designers, tasked by governmental and corporate clients to create safe, orderly parks and streets, deploy strategies to prevent uses of a place.
Typical site planning approaches prescribe a checklist of critical information landscape architects use to characterize topography, drainage, existing vegetation, nearby transportation facilities, or demographic information. While all approaches are value-laden, it is important to recognize when analysis that is either highly abstract (e.g., focused on demographics, aerial mapping, or similar ex situ imaging) or perfunctory might inadvertently allow designers to sift out evidence of site use that does not fit into predetermined categories. Uses include “microbe-like” tactics (de Certeau, 1984) and social habits that take varying, sometimes unexpected forms. The danger is that typical site analysis at best overlooks signs of proscribed activities and at worst regards them as nuisances to be erased. Hostile architecture and other normative reactions shut down the ontological possibilities of public space (Chellew, 2016). Approaching a site with openness, however, allows designers to take in the everyday meanings of place and the corollary, “improper” reappropriations of space that both reveal and transform those meanings and, in turn, reveal and transform the social milieus that created them. As a mode of praxis, widening the scope of site analysis to incorporate ad hoc urbanism allows for compassionate and creative ways to address these reappropriations.
It would be impossible to consider all the possible traces and meanings designers encounter in a site survey. The beauty of ad hoc urbanism is its boundlessness, which challenges attempts to corral, categorize, or diagram such practices (Iveson, 2013). However, to recognize it as a stepping-off point for making more inclusive programming and design decisions is to appreciate the deep communicative potential in the ways people use, misuse, and alter their public spaces.
METHODOLOGY
The tripartite method of this study began with an examination of the literature on urbanism from Lefebvre onward. As I stated above, most of the literature either limns typologies of different kinds of urbanisms or examines individual cases. The broad reach of these case studies suggested the many different forms insurgent urbanisms could take, from holding dance classes in the street to setting up hot dog stands to camping, thereby providing examples for the initial list and categories. Field observations noted and documented by the author between 2011 and 2021 became part of this list.
Each of the cases of ad hoc urbanism in the following section is accompanied by a speculative vision of potential design responses for a new norm. The cases were gleaned from a combination of sources: site observations, news stories, academic case studies, and a TEDx talk. They were selected because 1) they illuminate an important aspect of ad hoc urbanism, 2) supporting information and/or images were available, and 3) they illustrate the disconnect between how some people inhabit public space and how design permits people to inhabit it. The broad categories suggested by these cases (protest, memorial, messaging, encampments, gardening, informal labor, artmaking, and other commoning tactics) are by no means comprehensive but offer mere glimpses into the vastness and complexity of life in public space.
EXAMPLES OF AD HOC URBANISM
Protest
Despite social media’s increasing convenience and addictive power, many people still perform civic responsibilities—including, when necessary, civil disobedience—in outdoor public space. This is the realm in which political claims can be brought before other denizens of the city and individuals can express interests, values, and experiences that would not normally be brought up in the halls of power. Political performances such as marches and occupations introduce narratives into the wider discourse and allow disempowered political actors to tell stories that the members of the public can then discuss, contest, and potentially act on (Parkinson, 2012). Looking at protest through a design lens can show us how to design spaces for protest (to enable gathering and visibility), and in response to protest.
In the first instance, designers must recognize that protest in the face of untenable actions or entrenched inequities is our civic right (and, arguably, our duty). To be effective, protest must occur in full public view. Many governmental centers exist near some kind of civic space, such as a plaza or town square that can provide a place where people can gather peacefully and petition for redress of grievances. Yet power structures don’t always reside within governmental bodies or institutions. In capitalistic societies, corporate power brokers may lobby or leverage funds to participate in the governance of the state. The Occupy Wall Street movement coalesced around this issue.
An organizer of an Occupy Wall Street action described efforts to find a place near Wall Street that would work for their purposes. They needed it to be a POP (privately owned public space) that would not be subject to city park curfews and closures. The space needed to hold two thousand people, be unbarricaded, and highly visible (Schwartz, 2011). Zuccotti Park, open to the street on three sides, fit their criteria and so became the stage for an ephemeral mini city in which people lived from September to November 2011. Extrapolating from the organizers’ criteria, designing for peaceful civil demonstrations as a potential program element would mean creating large open spaces that offer unrestricted public access and are located in sites that are visible to the power players who have the authority to bring about beneficial change. This approach to design is the opposite of hostile architecture.
The second way of considering protest is through thoughtful design response to civic actions. Juan de Oñate was a Spanish conquistador notorious for his cruel treatment of Puebloan resisters to colonial rule. For the Indigenous community, he represents the brutality of the colonial era and the pain of their ancestors (Trujillo, 2008). On June 15, 2020, protestors tried to take down a bronze statue of Juan de Oñate, part of a series of sculptures entitled La Jornada, which had been erected two decades earlier in front of the Albuquerque Museum, located on City of Albuquerque, New Mexico, property. This demonstration resulted in a protester’s (nonfatal) shooting by a right-wing militia member.
The violence of the demonstration, the momentum of the Black Lives Matter protests around the country, and increasing protests by Indigenous rights groups, compelled the City of Albuquerque to initiate a “Race, History and Healing Project,” a series of public meetings, surveys, and interviews that began in July and wrapped up in October 2021. A core group made up of city staff, citizen advisory board members, and professional facilitators led a “community dialogue” during which 1,290 people completed surveys and 117 people completed telephone interviews expressing their views on the importance of the statue, the cultural heritage of the region, and the role of public space. The project culminated in a city council vote to remove the figure of Oñate and recontextualize the La Jornada series. The city’s Arts Board then began decommissioning the statue.
Typical responses to protests involve surveillance, containment, removal, arrests, and provocations. Although this example shows the potential for a social movement to influence public art and the morphology of public space, the depth of the change remains to be seen. At the time of this writing in July 2022, the Albuquerque City Council has not taken up the issue, but urban planners and designers can still view the survey results, raising the possibility of a different kind of response. For instance, it is possible to learn that 60% of the respondents supported not returning the statue to its original place. However, many respondents wanted to see the statue placed elsewhere or “recontextualized” as part of a shift in the way we understand racial conflict in our history. There was also a question related to park names that honored other controversial figures, such as Kit Carson, who forcibly removed 10,000 Navajo people from their land in the mid-19th century as part of a national campaign to obliterate Indigenous culture. Information gleaned from these discussions and surveys is available on the city’s website. It will provide designers a starting point for creating a new norm in design, at once reimagining the possibilities for a given space and suggesting the kinds of questions to ask in a public engagement process.
Memorial
Impromptu memorials disclose the ongoing interactions between people and their streets. They may be read as a celebration of life or reminder of death. But they also indicate other cultural and political requirements, such as the public’s desire for a place of mourning or survivors’ need to inscribe certain sites with spiritual meaning. Beyond that, a memorial that takes on the form of ad hoc urbanism may contain the seeds of protest, even if that is not recognized as its primary purpose. A memorial commemorating a tragedy or event brought about by an unjust situation can express counter-hegemonic social values.
In the 1970s, during the first Indigenous Rights movement, a protester defaced a racist war memorial on the Santa Fe Plaza by chipping out the word “savage” as a modifier for the word “Indians.” At a 2018 demonstration at that same monument, a protestor wrote in the word “resilient.” A nearby hand-lettered sign read “It matters who we elevate and celebrate,” emphasizing that old ways of thinking about and honoring history are ripe for reevaluation.
Following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis became a locus for memorials in honor of Floyd, organizational messages meant to coalesce the neighborhood around the issue of police brutality, places for giving away clothing and books, a large sculpture of a fist raised in the air, art installations, and other spontaneous acts of commoning. Protesters blocked traffic through the intersection for several months until the City of Minneapolis, working with a local group called the AGAPE foundation, removed the blockades. The city drafted a “truth and reconciliation” process declaring racism to be a “public health emergency.” They devised a public survey in which they asked 685 neighbors to share their preference for the intersection, which they characterized as “a sacred space for racial healing.” The ongoing public process of gathering information and consulting with stakeholders is meant to result in the construction of a permanent memorial.
Tactical resistance performed by unknown persons on a monument: chipping out the word “savage” and replacing it with “resilient” (2018). Photo by Aaron Cantú, The Santa Fe Reporter.
A ghost bike descanso in New Mexico (2021). Photo by the author.
First installed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2003, “ghost bikes” painted white are placed near locations of bicycle fatalities, often with identifying information and decorative elements. While primarily meant to commemorate individual riders and raise awareness of drivers to cyclists sharing their streets, they have other meanings. They may indicate problems in street design, an unwillingness to address social and mental health issues that lead to alcoholism and drunk driving, or underinvestment in safe public transportation. Constantini (2019) has called them “performative objects … to encourage social change” (p. 22).
Posters in Albuquerque, New Mexico (2020), and a makeshift message board in Cochabamba, Bolivia (2011). Photos by the author.
As with protest, designers can engage with different aspects of memorial-making. First, they can create spaces with room for memorial installations (as the City of Minneapolis demonstrated). Second, they can design responses to memorialized events, such as streets that are safer for cyclists.
Messaging
Informal and protest messages such as those posted on walls, power poles, electrical boxes, and elsewhere suggest that citizens need to communicate political information with one another outside of social media and other conventional channels. In Bolivia, a political organization called Red Tinku, which works for the rights of low-income families in the Cochabamba area, installed two information kiosks in the Plaza 14 de Septiembre. Its purpose was to share information outside the mainstream “neoliberal press.” The group posted an array of news stories, annotated with commentary and analysis. One hand-lettered sign encouraged people to “turn off the tv and come down to the plaza!” It went on to state: “Since the Water War of 2000, the plaza was taken over by the People and now is the political center of the resistance against neoliberalism and corruption.”
Signs observed along streets and bike paths in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, include a variety of messages. A xeroxed, handwritten message informs cyclists and pedestrians that Native, Black, and Hispanic communities suffer outsize burdens from oil and gas flares, reminding us that the fight for environmental justice is ongoing. Another hand-lettered poster directs passersby to a house where they can buy Indian tacos, a reminder of the continued need for and resourcefulness of those involved in the informal economy. An invitation to protest a proposed soccer stadium reminds us that such a structure would displace much-needed low-cost housing in the downtown area.
Where a typical response to billposting and signage generally involves removal, there are ways designers can create places for people to communicate important issues in public. Supportive design interventions have been simple and effective. In West Philadelphia, a nonprofit group partnered with West Philadelphia neighbors to build information kiosks in vacant lots (Masabo, 2015). In Portland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona, community-built message boards on street corners and vacant lots provide free, low-tech information exchange centers.
Encampments
Since 2017, the population of unsheltered homeless people has risen 30% in the United States. Official design responses to this critical, all-too-human need for space and shelter have been mixed, with some municipalities preferring to make homelessness invisible, either by shifting the populations to tent cities outside the city centers—such as Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon; Opportunity Village in Eugene, Oregon; and Camp Hope in Las Cruces, New Mexico—or by dispersing people indiscriminately (Oreskes, 2021). Bills have been brought up before state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Missouri, and Wisconsin to criminalize sleeping in public and penalize cities that refuse to enforce the bans (Hernández, 2022).
Camping out of the sun on a multi-use path, 2020. Photo by the author.
Recently, some cities have begun providing space for tents. In April 2022, the mayor of Albuquerque requested nearly 1 million dollars of the city’s budget to formalize tent cities and redesign unused parking lots for camping (Gonzales, 2022). Given the reluctance of some people to enter shelters, these might be among the best available solutions until cities and communities come up with better ways to serve unsheltered citizens.
Gardening
Guerrilla gardens evidence our biophilia, our longing to bring natural processes into everyday city life. They may also serve to protest the neglect of certain neighborhoods or, as Mikadze (2015) puts it, as a way of “‘editing’ the existing urban space programme” (p. 520) They stand as public statements in support food security and food sovereignty and, at the same time, contribute to it. Where people live in high-rise apartments or don’t have the space or resources to create gardens at home, their purpose might simply be to grow healthy food to eat in a particular food desert neighborhood (Finley, 2013). Groups such as Guerrilla Grafters, who graft fruit-bearing trees onto nonfruiting street trees (Shavelson, 2012), and The Common Studio, which makes seed bomb vending machines, have contributed to the visibility of a certain brand of guerrilla gardening.
Green Grounds, a nonprofit in South LA, began when Ron Finley (2013) began illegally planting vegetables in the strip of soil between the curb and the sidewalk in his neighborhood. It now allows community members to produce their own food, take gardening classes, and build neighborhood coherence. After a long struggle, the group convinced the city council to suspend enforcement of the law that made gardening in “devil’s strips” illegal (although notably, the city did not rescind the law itself).
The guerrilla gardening movement—perhaps because it has more in common with tactical urbanism in strategy, not to mention the fact that the “creative class” often initiates it—is a form of ad hocism that has been tentatively embraced by planning and design institutions. A growing number of municipal parks departments have begun including them in their facilities. Miami, Burbank, and Seattle are a few cities that currently manage community gardens as amenities of their park system. And yet there are always outliers. The guerrilla garden set up by the Echo Park tent community, which provided food for the makeshift communal kitchen, was removed along with the tents during the City of Los Angeles “sweeps.”
Informal Labor
Day laborers and street vendors pursue economic survival and participate in the production of space by using public and quasi-public sites as transactional platforms. These spatial practices are ephemeral. They can exist without their own urban infrastructure and require only parks, busy streets, parking lots, and vacant lots. As socio-economic practices, they are permanent features of a hierarchical, closed capitalist economy that pushes workers into informal economies, where they run the risk of bodily harm, having no protection against exploitation and coercion. Street vendors, especially people of color in poorer areas, are harassed or targeted for “urban cleansing” (Berglund, 2018; Rios, 2014, p. 173). Day laborers, lacking any formal structure or places to congregate to bid for jobs, often wind up in big box store parking lots, where they are harassed or cited for trespassing (Scarborough & Klawonn, 2003). Yet policing strategies fail because local economies depend on their willingness to work for low-wages, and because the workers rarely have other options.
A few cities are designing comfortable and safe areas for day laborers to convene for work. The city of Plano, Texas, which has an ordinance against “Solicitation by Pedestrians,” built its Day Labor Center to “eliminate a public safety hazard” (https://www.plano.gov/888/Day-Labor-Center). The center brings workers and customers together and attempts to minimize worker exploitation and wage theft by formalizing the hiring process. It was in a part of the city near other services that day laborers often require, such as housing services, a food pantry, a job training center, a library, and two health clinics. Cities throughout California (Pomona, Graton, and Laguna Beach) have formalized outdoor and indoor day labor areas. These examples show how public space can be designed to accommodate informal trade and labor practices and create venues to serve day laborers, some of whom might benefit from additional support.
Art
Municipalities may sanction public art as beautification or a marketing strategy. This effort may sometimes be a precursor to, or indicator of, neighborhood gentrification. Graffiti, including messaging and tagging, might be interpreted as a form of self-expression that doubles as a protest of neighborhood neglect (Berglund, 2018). However, some art interventions suggest a creative impulse divorced from political ends. A walk down an alley in San Luis Obispo, California, can open a visitor’s eyes to the ornamental possibilities of wet chewing gum; in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the medium may be plastic dinosaurs and pet rocks. Every Sunday, Siesta Beach in Sarasota, Florida, becomes a home for dance and drum circles. Slivers of streetscape and underpasses in Beijing, China, provide practice space for dance groups (Chen, 2010). Elsewhere, plazas and streets become stages for flash mobs and parks for artists to create “unplanned interactions with the public” (Seibert, 2017).
Venice Beach, California, has become the locus of a relational graffiti art project on which anyone can apply their spray-paint skills. Like protests, spontaneous and relational art interventions occur whether or not a space is designed to accommodate them, and formalized spaces such as the Venice art wall could be considered a form of official cooptation. However, permitting artists to bypass the normal gatekeepers (such as municipal public arts boards) may indulge the need to reclaim spaces and provide expressions of resistance by members of the community not normally invited to leave their mark on the urban fabric.
Commoning and Other Purposeful Tactics
The many other tactical engagements with public space not enumerated here are still worth acknowledging. Any landscape architect in public practice is likely to come across one or two during a typical site visit. In 2018, while working for the City of Albuquerque Parks and Recreation Department, I visited Alamosa Park, a park on the west side of town, to look at the tennis courts, where I saw that a non-city truck had driven across the turf grass and parked next to one of the group picnic shelters. The Parks Department had provided tables, benches, a shade structure and play area, along with everything else needed for a family picnic except an apparatus for preparing food. Consequently, it was not surprising to see that two men were unloading a grill from the back of the truck. By the time I got back to the office, a neighbor who lived across the street from the park had called in a complaint. The truck damaged some sprinkler heads, but the grill had no otherwise detrimental effect on the park and its management. However, the Park Department’s reaction was to spend $35,000 to have a post and chain barrier installed around the park. This was, for the department, a perfectly normal reaction to unwanted (and illegal) activity in the park. But what if someone from the Parks Department with decision-making power had thought about what that activity meant? For families whose circumstances make it necessary to use parks for large gatherings, grills, shade, and picnic tables are essential furnishings along with drinking fountains and restrooms (much-requested additions that the department regularly declines to install). In more densely populated communities, a lack of private outdoor space turns parks into commons, or de facto backyards. At Alamosa Park, the distance between the street parking and picnic areas left few options for groups wishing to have a barbecue; it was almost inevitable that someone would import their own grill. Thinking about the implicit need behind that activity might have suggested a different path: consultation with neighbors and other park users to find out if adding a few charcoal grills would create a more serviceable park.
When the pandemic forced his restaurant to close, this chef began operating within the informal economy. Los Angeles, 2021. Photo by Sophia Abbey-Kuipers.
DISCUSSION
These cases provide a window into the contours of insurgent and commoning activities that make up the variety of ad hoc urbanisms. Design literature has addressed insurgent and everyday urbanisms (combined here into “ad hoc urbanism”), celebrating the city’s chaotic milieu and understanding how people interact with it. In her introduction to Everyday Urbanism, Margaret Crawford (2008) wrote that “Design within everyday space must start with an understanding and acceptance of the life that takes place there” (p. 7). Apart from the everyday urbanist approach, there has been less written explicitly about how we can transform these understandings into design propositions. Perhaps the next sentences in Crawford’s essay explain why: “This goes against the grain of professional design discourse, which is based on abstract principles. … Professional abstractions inevitably produce spaces that have little to do with real human impulses” (pp. 7–8). It may be impossible, and probably unhelpful, to come up with a unified approach for a method of design that seems to require case-by-case consideration. By testing techniques for reading and interpreting ad hoc urbanisms, then testing ways to use those interpretations as the basis for a design program, we can bring them into the studio and nudge our practice even closer toward understanding real life.
One of the best illustrations of such an approach occurs in Walter Hood’s “improvisation” method of inquiry and design. His threefold process of observation, analysis, and vision solution entails an intimate and imaginative way of engaging with a place that makes its everyday truths widely legible. In his essay “Urban Diaries: Improvisation in West Oakland, California,” Hood (2008) observed human interactions in place, notating his thoughts about their value in the community and suggesting formal design interventions that make visible and legitimize not just the interactions, but the people who participate in them.
This method could be expanded to larger interactions, including ephemeral ones such as protests and demonstrations, or to traces left by people who tend to remain invisible. So far, this has not been a central consideration in landscape design process. The diverse perspectives inherent in social movements or traces of ad hoc activities create practical challenges. Landscape architects are trained to read sites, extract information through a combination of empirical and rational means, and participate in creating narratives that limn the scope and program of places. But perception is subjective and often culturally grounded, and it can be hard to know whether an interpretation is mere assumption (Linn, 1969), especially where the individuals involved are not available for consultation. But acknowledging the difficulties does not obviate the benefits of understanding how the unexpected uses reflect gaps in—for instance—park amenities (barbecue grills, benches for sleeping, sun, rain and wind protection), services (tent cities, guerrilla gardens, hydrants for drinking or washing), or opportunities for civic and social expression, connection, and communication (community message boards, graffiti walls, speakers’ corners).
Standard outreach paradigms tend to devolve responsibilities for creating public space to the usual suspects: municipal and business leaders, nonprofits, neighborhood and community leaders, and self-appointed spokespersons—all of whom tend to be grouped under the rubric “stakeholders.” The danger here is that solutions will co-opt the language of justice without employing a truly democratic, participatory process. A different approach begins with an awareness of the resource inequality that discourages participation among certain groups of residents. It necessarily includes inhabitants of the city whose material circumstances or whose historical disempowerment might preclude participation in typical outreach methods such as the evening meeting. On the other hand, decentralized processes that permit many styles of discourse, while more labor- and time-intensive, may be more effective. This approach has much in common with pluralistic agonism, which DiSalvo (2010) describes as a form of contestation that, in contrast to consensus-based decision-making, “has social, material and experiential consequences but does not result in the annihilation of the other” (p. 7).
Determining whether a design solution, once implemented, serves the goals of spatial justice presents another hurdle. People define justice in different ways, and the choices of some, such as the preference by some unsheltered individuals to remain in tents rather than go into permanent housing, may stymie or defy the expectations of others (Heben, 2014). Similarly, what constitutes hostile architecture for one person looks like defensive architecture to someone else, especially in contested public spaces where hegemonic spatial praxes create a sense of belonging for certain subgroups while inherently excluding others (Elias & Scotson, 1965). Establishing measures for assessing the planning and design process is important for determining protocols to advance justice. Justice in the landscape may be debated in terms of relative marginalization and powerlessness among subgroups (Young, 1988), aesthetic values (Castiglioni & Ferrario, 2018), or how a given solution meets the expectations of a particular neighborhood (Lopez, 2022). Short of restructuring neoliberal capitalism, it may be impossible to find a perfectly equitable solution to even narrowly defined problems.
At least four different NGOs concerned with justice in the built environment have attempted to address this problem. First, the Charter for the Right to the City, drafted in 2004 during the World Social Forum in the Americas, whose principles include: democratic management; the social function of the city; “guaranteeing for all its inhabitants’ full usufruct of the resources offered by the city;” equality; protection of “groups and persons in vulnerable situations;” and equitable and sustainable urban development. Second, the European Landscape Council’s Resolution on Landscape Democracy, penned and signed in 2014, which advocates for “plural and collective participation.” Third, the Project for Public Spaces’ (PPS) somewhat rote prescription for assessing good public space (i.e., using the criteria of Sociability, Uses and Activities, Access and Linkages, and Comfort and Image). Fourth, UN-Habitat’s assessment tools for public space (adapting PPS’s rubric), whose “Global Public Space Toolkit” hardly mentions homelessness and contains internal contradictions regarding the impact of market forces on public space. The PPS approach, so often geared toward economic development and promotion of tourism, tends to serve the interests of the powerful.
Although these NGOs pursue the noble goal of achieving landscape democracy, they operate on universal levels necessary but not sufficient for establishing a definitive answer to the question of spatial justice. They do pave the way for buy-in by authorities who make planning and design policy and enable the formation of coalitions ready to elevate ad hoc urbanisms to the level of socio-political campaigns (as is the case with the George Floyd Foundation). However, they cannot stand in for the relational specifics of place and time that comprise the entanglements of everyday life. Whether a public space addresses the needs of its urban guerrillas will be decided largely by the guerrillas themselves, not the NGOs, municipal planners, and politicians.
CONCLUSION AND FURTHER RESEARCH
Urban design, no matter how inclusive the process and how equitable the execution, cannot resolve the systemic injustices of our time. However, good design can attack aspects of large problems by examining and addressing them at finer scales, by observing “the intimacies of the body and the little tactics of the habitat” (Soja, 2010, p. 104). It can bring awareness to social problems and demonstrate constructive, compassionate responses.
Exploring the need for a new design tool to serve a diverse population is the primary purpose of this article. To develop such a tool, further research is needed to formulate and refine an epistemology of site analysis and planning that expressly focuses on ad hoc urbanism. Such research could examine the signs and traces left by users of public space—testing Fung’s “communicative acts” through public outreach or real-time observations/improvisations—á là Walter Hood—specifically designed to gain information about the inhabitants of a place, their agency and intent. While interpretations will inevitably be culturally grounded and subjective, it is possible to learn much more about how designers can support the interstitial uses of public space.
Case studies and practical investigations can test methods and approaches for assessing the success of collaborative design efforts and the perceived levels of inclusion they attain. Examples include Dzur’s (2008) task-sharing model, Langhorst’s (2018) assemblages, or Linn’s (1969) participatory approach for establishing “neighbourhood commons,” in which Linn himself acknowledged the failure of one effort. Research into public engagement tactics may allow us to test different forms of communication (front porch conversations, small community-led gatherings, tabling at markets and festivals) for reaching marginalized communities. Finally, the consensus-based tactics used in typical public engagement strategies, worn smooth by practice, are not the best way of communicating. Agonistic pluralism may contribute to more productive and equitable inquiry because the agonistic process itself favors polyvocality and dissent (DiSalvo, 2010). Eventually somebody will still make the design decisions, but at least they might contain a vestige of alternative preferences.
As stated in the previous section, the ultimate arbiters of a public space are the people who use it. Establishing essentialist definitions of spatial justice may only embed the problem further since looking at everyday practices of place- and space-making requires that designers see both connections between and particularities of activities that reappropriate public space. The accumulation of these particularities over time will create real transformation at an urban scale if they are observed and respected by responsive design. While arguing that design will not in itself create transformational change at the meso- and macro-scales, Iveson (2013) states: “It is important that democratic cities created through DIY urbanisms confront the city in which they have no proper part. … To give birth to a new city by acting politically will require us to make public claims on behalf of small-scale tactical interventions in the city which often thrive on a form of invisibility” (p. 946). Regardless of who the intended “we” of that statement might have been, it is clear that landscape architects, planners, and land managers are in a unique position to witness the invisible guerillas hiding in the midst of the city and to make such claims. The question, then, is twofold: first, whether landscape architects are willing to expand their normal roles (as executors of the client’s will) to advance spatial justice, and second, whether these same designers are willing to try to coalesce the polyvocal language of the citizenry into a full-scale chorus.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to guest editors Charlene LeBleu and Robert Corry for their encouragement and advice during the writing of this article. Thanks also to the three peer reviewers who provided critical feedback, and to Julie Ann Grimm (Santa Fe Reporter) and Sophia Abbey-Kuipers for permission to use their photos.
Footnotes
PEER REVIEW STATEMENT Landscape Journal uses a double-blind peer review process for original research manuscripts, systematic literature reviews, and other article types.
