Elsevier

Cities

Volume 40, Part B, October 2014, Pages 143-150
Cities

Rethinking urban transformation: Temporary uses for vacant land

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.04.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Question whether “permanent” solutions to vacant land are appropriate.

  • Outline potential drawbacks and benefits to new temporary use model.

  • Present supportive case for incremental and experimental responses to vacant land.

Abstract

As some cities grapple with economic decline and depopulating neighborhoods, a number of academics and professionals have focused their attention on the causes, conditions and patterns of the resultant vacant land, whereas others lay out broad programmatic, institutional, fiscal and design responses to address vacancy on site or citywide scales. We find that, regardless of condition and context, most responses advocate complex, officially sanctioned, formal programs and policies that call for or depend on implementation over several multi-year phases. While laudable in scope, we question whether “permanent” solutions are appropriate given the widely varying causes, durations, contexts and patterns of vacancy and the inability of similarly scoped government-led programs to thus far achieve intended goals or improve local quality of life. We present examples that make the case for temporary, incremental, flexible and experimental responses to urban vacant land, then conclude by outlining the potential benefits and drawbacks of this temporary use model.

Introduction

On a spring weekend in Berlin, the decommissioned and abandoned Tempelhof airport bustles with energy: thousands of people find their place in the vast area – picnicking, Frisbee throwing, spontaneous soccer matches, musicians practicing their craft, families barbecuing, students reading books, people tending to small vegetable and flower beds children flying kites. None of this was planned or programmed in the traditional sense; instead, these spontaneous activities rose up in the absence of planning, since the City has been unable to redevelop the site as planned due to budget constraints and onerous upfront construction costs.

In St. Louis’s urban core, one can see a dense successional forest emerging. On aerial photographs, it distinctly resembles Central Park in New York City, only with more trees. Walking by the chain link fences that separate it from the street, the birdsong makes one forget one is still in a city. This forest has emerged on abandoned sites including the former Pruitt-Igoe housing project. These parcels now host new ecologies that create visual intrigue, provide opportunities to interact with forms of urban nature, and serve a number of infrastructural benefits, from stormwater infiltration to new habitat establishment to urban heat island mitigation.1 All of these benefits were unplanned and required no new investment from the City.

These are not isolated cases. In Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago, many vacant lots now contain plots of sunflowers, root vegetables and rows of corn flourishing in temporary community gardens filled with neighbors watering, weeding, or just chatting about the day’s business. In Sebastopol, CA a parking lot transforms twice weekly into a vibrant market for all kinds of organic food and produce – complete with a colorful and mostly suburban crowd milling around – surrounded by abandoned warehouses that simultaneously emit a feeling of being on the “wrong side of the tracks.” And on Cleveland’s Lorain Avenue thoroughfare – a street with lined by chain businesses and parking lots – a sliver of the rural appears in the raised beds and chickens wandering around backyard coops.2,3

Any landscape architect or designer of public space would be proud of such diverse uses.4 What these examples have in common is that all take place on formerly vacant land, and all can be considered temporary uses. But what does it mean for a use to be temporary, especially since all uses can be considered temporary, with some just lasting longer than others (i.e., a 99-year leasehold is still “temporary” in the long run)? We adopt a definition derived from Bishop and Williams (2012) that argues that temporary use cannot be “based on the nature of the use, or whether rent is paid, or whether a use is formal or informal, or even on the scale, longevity or endurance of a temporary use, but rather the intention of the user, developer or planners that the use should be temporary” (p. 5). Indeed, they continue, the temporary phase can be short or long, accidental or planned, legal or illegal, but what distinguishes it from a “permanent” use on one hand and a stop-gap or interim use on the other, is that these distinctions assume that temporary use is secondary or provisional, a stand-in or substitute for the preferred permanent option.5 So here we define temporary use as that which is explicitly and intentionally time-limited in nature.

In this paper, we explore the potential for this temporary use model and conclude with some thoughts on the benefits, drawbacks and conditions in which this model might gain a foothold in the context of vacant land. This article is not a “how to” guide for professionals seeking solutions to vacant land, rather it is an exploration of the possibilities for the temporary use and occupation in cities. Now we must define what we mean by vacant land.

Section snippets

Defining vacant land

We use a broad definition of vacant land to include all land that is unused or abandoned for the longer term, including raw dirt, spontaneous vegetation and emergent ecologies, land with recently razed buildings, perimeter agricultural land fallen out of cultivation, brownfields and other contaminated sites, or land that supports long-term, abandoned derelict structures. When no structure exists, one can consider land vacant if the property is not currently used by humans. When a structure sits

Views of vacant land

Historically, scholars and planners have viewed vacant land as a problem that must be “fixed,” but the upsurge in vacant land as a result of ongoing deindustrialization, as well as the challenges associated with planning in the context of “shrinking cities” has given rise to approaches that consider vacant land as a resource, one that can even provide opportunities for transformative social and ecological processes.

Community gardens on single and multiple lots, small-scale urban agriculture

Addressing urban vacant land

Cities adopt a number of approaches for dealing with vacant land. In their US-based study of cities that that lost the highest population from 2006 to 2009, Németh and Hollander (2012) detail the variety of strategies adopted by a cross-section of cities (see Table 2).

Some of these strategies have proven more successful than others (Schilling & Logan, 2008), but what is interesting is the range of suggested permanence of each intervention. Some, like the Adopt-A-Lot and the Clean and Green

Temporary use model

In our increasingly complex urban world, “no single master plan can anticipate the evolving and varied needs of an increasingly diverse population or achieve the resiliency, responsiveness and flexibility that shorter-term, experimental endeavors can” (Arieff, 2011). Indeed, the predominating capitalist development models will always be characterized by boom/bust, decline/growth cycles. What Harvey calls the “spatial fix,” or the fixing of capital to a particular place, is never absolute or

Conditions for temporary use

We does not aim to provide a step-by-step guide for implementing the temporary use model in vacant lots; instead, given the preceding discussion, we aim to understand the conditions for which temporary occupation or use might be more or less appropriate (see Table 3). We do not mean to suggest that any individual parcel or neighborhood or city will fall into one category at any one time: on the contrary, most places will fall in one column in some categories and the other in other categories.

Assessing the temporary use model

Bishop and Williams (2012) consider temporary uses “a manifestation of a more dynamic, flexible and adaptive urbanism, where the city is becoming more responsive to new needs, demands and preferences of its users”. We contend that there are indeed many benefits to a temporary use model, but also acknowledge that there are drawbacks that can be significant. Such benefits and drawbacks can be political (administrative and/or procedural), economic, social and/or ecological. Obviously, such

Conclusion

With attention to minimizing the drawbacks and maximizing the benefits, the temporary use model may offer a promising alternative to the traditional approaches to urban vacant land. Cities are in a constant state of flux, and mediate a wide range of often conflicting processes, agendas, interests and values: “The city is never an end state but is perpetually evolving” (Bishop & Williams, 2012, p. 19).

Spatial planning and design fields have traditionally been occupied with trying to exercise

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hamil Pearsall, Susan Lucas and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance and Chris Ryerson for his valuable research assistance.

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