Everyday Urbanism is a concept introduced by Margaret Crawford, John Chase and John Kaliski in 1999. Everyday Urbanism is in Margaret Crawford words: ”an approach to Urbanism that finds its meanings in everyday life”.
Contrary to
New Urbanism
New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually inf ...
, Everyday Urbanism is not concerned with aesthetics but with specific activities of the daily life. It constitutes an empirical approach that strengthens frequently unnoticed existing situations and experiences that occur in everyday life.
Everyday Urbanism can also be considered as a method with a multidimensional consideration of the value of public spaces as it introduces various responses to specific times and places. For instance, the value of
public space
A public space is a place that is open and accessible to the general public. Roads (including the pavement), public squares, parks, and beaches are typically considered public space. To a limited extent, government buildings which are open to ...
s and community life is burst with
street markets
A marketplace or market place is a location where people regularly gather for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, and other goods. In different parts of the world, a marketplace may be described as a '' souk'' (from the Arabic), ' ...
, street food vendors and murals organically created; this burst created by community life results in improvements to the public space that 'Everyday Urbanism' understands as an ‘improvement by appropriation’
or as a challenging appropriation of places in the city with temporary, short-lived urban activities.
The study of Everyday Urbanism contributes
urban planning
Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...
and
urban design
Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban de ...
studies with an approach to the understanding of the social use of space. It introduces the idea of eliminating the distance between experts and ordinary users and forces designers and planners to contemplate a ‘shift of power’ and address social life from a direct and ordinary perspective.
Unlike urban design practices, Everyday Urbanism is not interested in the complete transformation of sites or urban spaces but instead in the intensification of these experiences by “working along with, on top of or after them”.
Margaret Crawford indicates that the primary intention of the book ‘Everyday Urbanism’ was a “call to action”, she explains that the unification of ideas and practices presented in the book seek to introduce incentives for designers to rethink the approaches they currently use to understand everyday spaces and “to reconnect these human and social meanings with urban design and planning”.
In contrast, David Walters in ‘New Urbanism and neighborhoods’ explains that Everyday Urbanism follows the roots of Postmodern planning theory in the sense that is less concerned with design as a practice and constructs a theory of explanation by hypothesizing meanings contained in the urban condition, therefore, not a theory of action
as Crawford suggests.
David Walters introduces an additional interpretation; he finds Everyday Urbanism when “local communities and entrepreneurs reclaim leftover spaces of the capitalist city for their own use”.
Examples presented in the first introduction of the concept Everyday Urbanism were mostly based in cities like Los Angeles and New York in The United States. Examples of Everyday Urbanism contain appropriations of urban space such as temporary markets, ad hoc festivals or ad hoc street fairs on deserted parking lots,
garage sale
A garage sale (also known as a yard sale, tag sale, moving sale and by many other namesSome rarely used names include "attic sale," "basement sale," "rummage sale," "thrift sale," "patio sale," "lawn sale," and "jumble sale".) is an informal ...
s, street vendors and murals.
Ethnic minority group cases such as the Latino community in Los Angeles present transformation of the public environment on streets, fences, garages and yards, Camilo José Vergara documents this as part of the essays presented in the book ‘Everyday Urbanism’
Influences
The work of Margaret Crawford, John Chase and John Kaliski on Everyday Urbanism was inspired by French philosophers
Henry Lefebvre,
Guy Debord
Guy-Ernest Debord (; ; 28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationis ...
and
Michael de Certeau. Crawford explains how they serve as an introduction to Everyday urbanism:
“While acknowledging the oppression of daily life, each discovered its potential as a site of creative resistance and laboratory power. They insisted on the connections between theory and social practices, between thought and lived experience.”
Lefebvre insisted that experts considered everyday life as trivial and therefore ignore it. Lefebvre was probably the most important influence in their work, given that he presented urban conditions as everyday activities that are frequently overlooked.
Concepts and Principles of Everyday Urbanism
The concept ‘Everyday Spaces’ is defined by Crawford as: “a diffuse landscape of banal, repetitive and ‘non-design’ locations”.
Crawford presents migrants as an example of groups that appropriate spaces of the environment and create “
vernacular architecture
Vernacular architecture is building done outside any academic tradition, and without professional guidance. This category encompasses a wide range and variety of building types, with differing methods of construction, from around the world, bo ...
” in neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Unlike carefully planned spaces, everyday spaces are the public use found in underused spaces.
Everyday Urbanism is less concerned with spaces of the
bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...
such as manicured lawns, but rather interested in the poorer areas of cities, which is the opposite of designed public spaces under New Urbanism practices.
A principle introduced by Crawford is ’Refamiliarization’, she explains how Everyday Urbanism seeks to make ‘brutal’ spaces more ‘inhabitable’ by trying to “domesticate urban space”. She introduces examples such as streets of Los Angeles where refamiliarization brings economic and cultural activities created by residents.
As a consequence of the mismatch of aspirations between designers and the community, Crawford introduces a key principle ‘Dialogic’, she defines it as: “when a word, discourse, language, meaning (or building) becomes deprivileged, relativized, and aware of competing definitions for the same thing.”
References
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Urban design
Everyday life