Last Friday, while discussing the history of Seattle as presented by Matthew Klingle in Emerald City, we began sharing some really cool ideas about the possibilities for temporary changes to cities. In the midst of this overturned economy, many cities across the U.S. have vacant storefronts and lifeless and inactive streets and street corners, and whereas city planners, landscape architects, and architects often operate through the manipulation of space, the graduate seminar group began to wonder aloud about possibilities for temporal interventions. Some such impermanent businesses, parks, and plazas are well known and readily imaginable: vendor carts, food trucks, and carnivals are parts of many of our cultural upbringings.
Together, however, we began to discuss our own unsketched ideas and, in a few cases, glimpses of actual programs. These are messy matters, temporary experiments at attracting vitality to otherwise clean, quiet, safe urban spaces. For your perusal, I’ve compiled a brief set of links, photos, and videos on some of these already- (or, to put a finer point on it, at-one-time-) existing temporary interventions. Enjoy!
-Mike
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Terry Schwarz is the senior planner at Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, as well as the lead behind Cleveland’s Pop Up City, a really cool, fun organization specializing in temporary events and installations in Cleveland. In the video below, she gives a quick (13 min) talk about the potential for things like Pop Up City.
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“Flash Mobs” have been around for a while, I suppose, but they can also bring about a fun, different way of looking at urban spaces. (Though, based on my google searches, it looks like some Philadelphia and London police and citizens aren’t so charmed by them. The Philadelphia case does seem a potential public safety concern, to be fair.) Here are a couple that took place in train stations:
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“Parking Day” has grown from a single event in San Francisco in 2005 to a global, one day event in which parking spaces are reclaimed as public space for non-stationary-automotive purposes. In Seattle, UW’s own Keith Harris, a PhD student in Built Environments, has been a central figure in creating a temporary park from a surface parking lot in Capitol Hill. Here’s a little news coverage of Seattle’s 2010 Parking Day.
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Finally, some high-end retailers and restaurateurs have developed their own temporary approaches to luxury and distinction. In Downtown Los Angeles circa 2008, Japanese clothing designer Comme des Garcons opened a pop-up store in an alley off 4th Street. Here are some photos of it. And, in an upscale update to the long-lived phenomenon of working class food trucks and carts, cities across the U.S. are seeing the rise of luxurious, innovative mobile cuisine. Using twitter to update hungry consumers, upscale trucks can move from neighborhood to neighborhood in a single night.
Fancy food trucks are all over the place in L.A. and in Portland, OR, but in Seattle, city restrictions seem to be holding back the potential for further mobile deliciousness.
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What are other temporary, experimental, fun interventions into urban space? What else might policies and designs focused on temporary changes to cities do? And what might they look like? Any other ideas out there?
Now Urbanism 