City Sessions: Four Questions on Tactics, Urbanism, and Practice.

August 22-September 18, 2011 Live Discussion and Party: Sunday, September 18. Parson School of Design. 5-7 p.m. Leagues and Legions (#lgnlgn) in conjunction with the Institute for Urban Design’s Urban Design Week is hosting City Sessions, an online discussion on the practice of tactical urbanism and socially active design. Tactical urbanism uses the city as a site of experimentation, deploying pop-up parks, vacant retail reuse, or unsanctioned street furniture as way to reprogram the urban realm. The practice traditionally takes an activist position in relationship to environmental, political, cultural and economic factors. However, as the practice is increasingly being absorbed into mainstream thinking on cities, it is critical that we look closely at both the underlying assumptions and resulting effects. LGNLGN and IfUD are asking critics, practitioners, academics, community organizers, and the general public to weigh in on one of four questions dealing with issues of tactical urbanism. Each question will tackle a particular theme: the public, professional practice, evaluation, and failure. The City Session questions will post online in the three weeks leading up to Urban Design Week (September 15–20) and culminate in a live discussion of the crowdsourced responses on September 18. Participants are encourage to follow the discussion at: http://city-sessions.tumblr.com/ Join the backchannel discussion on Twitter by following @IfUD and hashtags #lgnlgn and #citysessions. Urban Design Week is a new public festival created to engage New Yorkers in the complex issues of the public realm, and to celebrate the streetscapes, sidewalks, and public spaces at the heart of city life. The event highlights the fact that cities are made by collective effort. The Institute for Urban Design is organizing the festival with the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund, and in so doing, aims to reinvigorate the debate about public realm. Leagues and Legions is a think tank at the intersection of architecture and publishing. Composed of architects, urbanists, graphic designers, and writers, we like to provoke discourse. City Sessions Questions: PUBLIC In a city, where myriad interests are often in competition at any given spot, "public engagement" is a slippery term that raises the important and oft-ignored question: Which public? Before the evaluation of urban tactics can begin, one must define the group or groups of people they are working to engage. As architects and designers develop tactics to address specific sites and conditions, how are they deciding which groups to orient their projects toward? Beyond that, how can various factors—demographics, geography, politics, et al.—change the way that different publics view and engage with different tactics? EVALUATION In recent years tactical urbanism has moved from the fringe of architectural and urban design practice to the center. However, because these works often skirt the edges of activist art and nonprofit community organizing it is difficult to determine a project’s success in relationship to design, outreach, and influence over policy. As tactical practices shift to the mainstream, how do we evaluate and critique this diverse range of architectural actions and urban interventions? What belongs on a post-occupancy punchlist for best tactical practices? TACTICS AND THE DESIGN PROFESSIONS As global political and social changes pressure how designers work, many practices are using their design skills to tactically confront environmental, political, and economic issues at all scales. Some of these tactical practices break with traditional disciplinary boundaries and expand the role of the designer. How is practice changing to tactically address environmental, social, and political issues in the built environment? What further changes are necessary to tackle these large problems with ever-decreasing funding? What steps should the profession take to address these contemporary pressures? FAILURE Where does the notion of failure come from and why is it rearing its head again now? While failure might work in software and startups, what happens when we apply that ethic to interventions at the scale of buildings and cities? How can the fail-early-fail-often tactic be used for urban change—such as hackathons, or pilot programs like San Francisco’s parklets? Is failure related to the temporary or the long term?