Common urban issues we face today revolve around the effects of environmental changes. While this problem has been longing, the extent to which it will improve or worsen depends on cities impending actions.
In 2018, a group of researchers put forward the propounding concept of Urban Tinkering, which aims to answer social, economic, and ecological demands through sustainable development and redevelopment of urban amenities. Urban tinkering is a transformative approach in tackling environmental planning, engineering, and managing of the urban environment. The idea steers to adapt, alter, and repurpose dysfunctional structures into more practical and beneficial uses for the society.
“Urban Tinkering can function by promoting a diversity of small-scale urban experiments that, in aggregate, lead to large-scale often playful innovative solutions to the problems of sustainable development” (Elmqvist, Thomas, et al., pp.1., 2018).
The concept reinforces the currently lacking bridge between crucial experts in development, including planners, engineers, architects, ecologists, and others. As a result, urban tinkering has supplemented and enhanced traditional development through its unpredictability, flexibility, and multi-faceted approaches. Essentially, adopting this attitude in planning and design would be valuable as it brings advantages to the environment as well as citizens’ welfare.
References
Elmqvist, T., Siri, J., Andersson, E., Anderson, P., Bai, X., Das, P. K., Gatere, T., Gonzalez, A., Goodness,
J., Handel, S. N., Hermansson Török, E., Kavonic, J., Kronenberg, J., Lindgren, E., Maddox, D., Maher, R., Mbow, C., McPhearson, T., Mulligan, J., Nordenson, G., Spires, M., Stenkula, U., Takeuchi, K., Vogel, C. (2018). Urban tinkering. Sustainability Science, 13(6), 1549–1564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0611-0