Going Rogue Goes Mainstream

By Brian Barth

Google "tactical urbanism" and your screen will be flooded with images of people sipping tea in Portland's streets amid flower planters, street chalk designs, and plywood coffee tables — part of the now-famous Park(ing) Day tradition — or stringing rainbow-colored balls above Montreal's Rue Sainte-Catherine (just for the hell of it).

You may see photos of hundreds of Pittsburghers triking the downward dog pose in a mass yoga session at Market Square, or knitters "yarnbombing" trees in front of the San Francisco Civic Center with yarn octopuses and giraffes.

While these splashy and headline-worthy urban interventions have merit in their own right, in some ways they have contributed to the term's growing reputation as a mere buzzword rather than an effective immediate, low-cost technique to improve the urban experience.

For example, your Google search results likely won't reflect the smaller, but in some ways more impactful, projects: the new crosswalk painted by the residents of Ponderay, Idaho, a former mining town about eight hours north of Boise near the Canadian border; the bike path marked in removable paint that recently materialized across a giant parking lot in Bella Vista, Arkansas, a town of 26,000 in the Ozarks; the installation of temporary bollards in nearby Rogers, Arkansas (pop. 67,000), part of an experiment to see how residents would respond to protected bike lanes.

These are just a few of the places that Street Plans Collaborative, the planning firm headed by Mike Lydon and Tony Garcia (who are credited with founding the tactical urbanism movement) have been working on of late. The duo is increasingly turning their attention to smaller cities and towns, more and more of which are seeking their services. And they aren't the only ones.

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, citizens installed a temporary roundabout at an intersection and painted their own bike lanes — activities that might have previously landed them in jail. To create these public-facing programs, Street Plans worked extensively to gain buy-in from municipal stakeholders. Photo courtesy City of Fayetteville.

Cans of paint for the temporary roundabout and bike lanes project. Photo courtesy City of Fayetteville.

Painting in the intersection. Photo courtesy City of Fayetteville.

Work with what you've got

Despite its buzzword reputation, tactical urbanism has been widely lauded as a cost-effective way to boost civic engagement, clean up blighted areas, and attract investment dollars. That's helpful in any community, but especially in small, cash-strapped places that can only dream of having the funding to execute splashy civic projects.

Tactical urbanism and small communities are a natural match for a variety of reasons, Garcia says, most of them practical. For example, in addition to lower costs, "the smaller the community, the less bureaucracy; and the less bureaucracy, the easier it is to do this type of work. [Tactical urbanism] projects often get watered down when you're dealing with lots of different city departments and officials."

By this logic, Ponderay, Idaho (pop. 1,135), run by a staff of three (the public works director, planning director, and zoning administrator are all the same guy), makes an ideal client. In this town, where the per capita income is less than $19,000, the firm was hired to develop a form-based code, a subarea plan, and a greenbelt plan, all with the overarching vision of steering the urban fabric toward a more walkable main-street vibe, says Garcia. "There's a grid of historic streets, but the town is mostly trailers and shotgun shacks. Their big tax base is that they have the regional Walmart. The challenge was to do a plan that acknowledged this was a place that was not likely to see tens of millions of dollars in investment in the coming years."

Garcia insists that the tactical part of tactical urbanism isn't just about guerrilla gardening events and washable street chalk. It's any tactic that recognizes the value of inexpensive, short-term interventions to catalyze long-term goals. In Ponderay, this played out in several ways. First, the codes and plans were designed to celebrate the existing urban fabric for the ways it already upheld urbanist principles.

"We designed the code to allow, as of right, informal economic activities that were already happening," such as a five-by-five shack that served as a coffee shop in the parking lot of a defunct strip mall — "in hopes of unlocking the economic potential that's already there."

Civic engagement also played a big role. Ponderay isn't a place where planning and zoning matters have traditionally been very prominent on the public radar, so the Street Plans staff went door to door to explain what they were up to and invite folks to a charrette. They heard a common refrain from residents: One of the roads leading out of town was desperately in need of a crosswalk. So, in the middle of the charrette, they took the group out and painted one.

Garcia says the cost for supplies ran about $150, versus the tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention months or years of planning, designing, and waiting that would likely have been required for the department of transportation to do the job.

"In a place like Ponderay, it's important to get people involved and show them that planning is about more than just having a master plan that sits on the shelf," he says. "We've found that in small places there is often a willingness to go off script, to try things out and be informal, whereas big cities tend to be more bound by regulation. Smaller cities, towns, and rural locations often get overlooked in the [tactical urbanism] conversation, but in our view, that's really where we can have the greatest impact."

Ponderay, Idaho's Village of Ponderay Master Plan envisions an expansion of the historic grid of compact blocks at the edge of Lake Pend Oreille and the creation of walkable public spaces. It will meet the challenge using inexpensive, short-term interventions to catalyze long-term goals. Plan rendering courtesy Street Plans.

Getting out of the big city

The tactical urbanism movement has spawned a slew of consultancies that cater to this iterative, light-touch brand of planning — the antithesis, perhaps, of the master planning approach, though in a complementary sort of way. More and more of these firms are branching out of in-town neighborhoods and into the suburbs and hinterlands of America.

Among them is Ash + Lime, a Dallas-based firm that hews to "nimble, actionable, and participatory" approaches to planning, terms that Rik Adamski, the firm's founder, tends to use in places where jargony phrases like "tactical urbanism" don't help him get the point across.

"Sometimes there can be a perception that the tactical urbanism approach is for a hipster demographic," says Adamski. "But it's actually quite universal. It's about figuring out where a community is at and giving them tools to make the place where they live better in the long run. The language you might use to describe something or the people you bring in front of the community at meetings might be different in different places, but I've found that the basic principles of what we do work the same, whether we're in a town of 1,500 or a city of 1.5 million."

The smallest community Ash + Lime has worked in is Lone Star, Texas, (pop. 1,500), located just 40 miles from the Louisiana line. But most of their work is in the suburban and periurban reaches of Dallas. The firm typically follows a sequence of steps in which each one is informed by, and builds on, the successes of the previous one. Food trucks, pop-up markets, and other means of "activating the space" figure early in this process. If all goes well, these early interventions eventually lead to traditional planning and design work, as well as long-term relationships with communities.

He sees a social justice as a component in his work: "As an urbanist, it would be easy for me to focus only on certain types of places, but we can't just give up on entire swaths of the country. We need to find opportunities in all types of places to make them better."

Resident-led placemaking

Because tactical urbanism strategies can produce such immediate and tangible impacts in small cities and towns, it seems these are the places where it is becoming institutionalized. Street Plans recently worked with several small communities to develop guidelines for citizen-initiated tactical urbanism projects. These typically include a permitting process so people can carry out activities in the right-of-way and other public spaces that would otherwise be prohibited. Snellville, Georgia (pop. 20,000); Burlington, Vermont (pop. 42,000); and Fayetteville, Arkansas (pop. 84,000), are three examples. In Fayetteville, citizens recently installed a temporary roundabout at an intersection and painted their own bike lanes — activities that might have previously landed them in jail. To create these public-facing programs, the team worked extensively to gain buy-in from municipal stakeholders.

"It's in dialogue with engineering departments where we've found that we can have the most impact. If we can address their concerns about these projects, we can really accelerate and scale up implementation," says Garcia. "We've found that residents in smaller communities actually have more energy for these types of projects [than those in big cities] — they just need the political will behind them to make it happen."

Current conditions on Ponderay's main street are treacherous for bicyclists and pedestrians, while buildings turn their backs to the street. The plan's vision calls for reconstruction of the street as a tree-lined boulevard with a trail and small-scale building frontages. Top photo by Jim Kumon. Bottom photosimulation courtesy Street Plans/Carly Clark.

Brian Barth is a freelance journalist with a background in urban planning.