Urban Tinkering: The Innovative and Sustainable Approach for Broken Spaces

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

Temporary autonomous spaces. On time, space and insurgencies.

The occupation of space is crucial for the development of self-determination, autonomy and sense of place. However, the question of time (in addition to space) is often overlooked. Autonomy is made of practices, networks, flows, organization and exchanges. These obviously unfold in a given space, but they can also survive beyond the space. When for one reason or another we have to move into another place, we can take the practices with us. Therefore, we can say that autonomy survives in time – even though not necessarily in space.  This is applicable to our own personal spaces, homes, working places and public spaces.

This is the main argument of Hakim Bey (1991) in his classic book Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). Bey describes how utopia can only materialize ephemerally (after all utopia, u-topos in Greek, literally means “in no place”). These types of places are flexible, mutable and nomadic. Therefore, they become fertile ground for creativity and experimentation. The following story about an occupied social center in Barcelona helps us reflect about the concept of TAZ and its potential as an alternative conceptual tactic of citymaking. 

The Rimaia stays in the neighborhood  

Figure 1. La Rimaia remains in the neighborhood. Activists marching in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood and preparing to occupy an apartment. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

In the summer of 2010, The Free University of La Rimaia was evicted for the second time from a squatted building. The eviction occurred at 7:00 AM, and in question of hours a demonstration of about three thousand people was organized. Chanting the slogan La Rimaia es queda al barri! (La Rimaia remains in the barrio) they marched around the neighborhood and after two hours they collectively broke into an abandoned building and squat it. By 7:00 PM La Rimaia had a new campus.  Since then La Rimaia had been evicted twice more, but it still remains in the barrio.

Figure 2. Map of the march. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

La Rimaia was founded in 2008-2009 as a response to the Bologna Process to standardize higher education in Europe.  It began as a debate workshop in a squatted houses and it soon started being called a free university. It is leaderless, it has no academic hierarchies and delivers no diplomas. It is a center to learn about and from quotidian practices. It’s motto Crear, Lluitar, Poder Popular (Create, Struggle, People’s Power) reveals they thought of the Okupa (Squatter) Movement: it describes practices, rather than values.  Everyday practice, as described in the work of Lefebvre, Debord, Bourdieu and De Certeau, is the inspiration of the Okupa Movement. To elude the cooptation and crystallization of an ideology they want to be defined by what they do rather by what they say, read or think.  Therefore, a physical space is secondary, as practices can be reproduced in different settings.  

The spirit of the Okupa Movement is summarized in the subtitle of the recently released film Squat: La ville est à nous (The city is within ourselves). In the film, as in most Okupa marches, you can hear the slogan “Un desalojo, otra okupacion!” (“One eviction, another occupation!”), that refers to the fact that the idea that inspired the squat can be taken into a different one after eviction (en.unifrance.org, 2011). 

Figure 3. Occupied house in Barcelona. Occupied houses were often used as spaces of artistic and social experimentation. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

Back to the eviction of La Rimaia, the activists left the place from where they were evicted and “carried” the autonomy into the new house (See Figure)  At the end of the day, the demonstration stopped in front of a building where the soon-to-be occupied apartment was. A group of activists opened the door from inside and when they looked down the crowd cheered. The environment was festive. One of the activists that I interviewed, smiled at me and said: “This is a beautiful occupation!” There was no mourning for the loss of the previous space. They were now excited about the new start that the actual occupation entailed:  Autonomy surviving in time, but not in space.

Figure 4. Okupa activist. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

Matchmaking in the community: Restaurants X Artists

Food brings comfort to the body and soul. Art comforts the disturbed. What more could we ask for when the two come together hand-in-hand? The Neighbourhood Curbside Canvas Project in New York City is a neighbourhood relief effort that pairs local restaurants and bars with local artists. The force behind this project is Bill Tsapalas, a long-time residence of the Tribeca neighbourhood in NYC. Growing up in a restaurant family Bill is aware of the difficult times restaurants and bars are going through during the pandemic times. As a creative director and marketer himself, Bill pairs up restaurants with artists. Targeting outdoor dining spaces, artists helped turn makeshift plywood dining structures into curbside street art installations.

Restaurants get hit hard by the pandemic while artists also go through various struggles with the shutting down of art galleries and cancellation of exhibitions and activities. With this Neighbourhood Curbside Canvas Project, local artists are provided with platforms to perform and showcase their creativity. The vibrant outdoor dining spaces create visual interests, enhance dining experience and bring life back in the neighbourhood.

Here is how the ‘matchmaking’ works:

The Neighbourhood Curbside Canvas Project is a volunteer-based project.  Local artists voluntarily work with the restaurants while restaurants feed the artists and pay for the supplies. The Dark Horse was the first restaurant/bar to participate in this project. Six weeks after the pilot project, 2o volunteer artists had transformed 13 restaurants’ pop-up patios into street art. Check out more artists in action here!

Artist Tato was paired with Weather Up TriBeCa, a craft cocktail bar on Duane Street:

The Connection is back! Speculative news from the Iranian front

We don’t know what’s happening in Iran right now. The Internet has been completely shut down for almost a week. In response to the countrywide protests, the regime has opted once again for repressing and largely ignoring the demands of the people. Tweets sent via proxies (#internet4iran #HelpIran #IranProtests) report more than 200 people murdered, 3,700 wounded and 7,000 arrested. But, we can only see 7-second-long pixelated, trembling videos of smoky scenes. Some show crowds running away from the tear gas and live ammunition covering their mouths with their hands. Others start with the warning, “the following images may be disturbing for some readers:” three people carrying a young protester with a bleeding exposed fracture and two more applying an improvised tourniquet to his leg. Others show protesters standing by a barricade and repelling the riot police with rocks. 

We know very little. So, we can only speculate about what is happening. Like paleontologists who reconstruct a full body from three phalanges, a rib and the fragment of skull, we have to complete the scenario from tweets, short videos and the accounts of friends who talked to their parents in the phone for three minutes. We want to know about the situation in the past 6 days beyond global politics and the opportunistic tweets of some American senators and congresspeople. We want to know how everyday life unfolds with no Internet for over a week in the middle of an unstoppable uprising. 

Speculative news from an offline revolution

Everybody is speculating, as there are very few known facts about the situation. The press creates narratives based on which stories sell more and which doesn’t. Western governments curate information using a simple formula: Western and Non-western, Western and the rest of the world. Let us then speculate about what would happen if we loose Internet connection at the level of human connection. 

Disconnection

Day One.Sudden silence. Message not delivered (try sending again). No double ticks in WhatsApp and Telegram. You wonder if there is something wrong with the WiFi. You plug and unplug the modem. You turn the cellphone on and off. This coincides with traffic jams and scattered protests across town. An hour later, there’s an official address from the supreme leader in the TV. He backs the government’s decision to raise gasoline prices and calls the ongoing protests riots and the work of “thugs.” You piece it all together. The Internet has been shut down. 

Day Two.You wake up, and the first thing you do is to pick up your cellphone — before drinking water, before going to the bathroom. It is almost a reflex. You check your social networks. No likes, no hearts, no emojis, no comments. You go about your day and carry your phone around as if it was glued to your hand. As you leave your apartment, you see a neighbor you have never talked to before and start chatting about the lack of Internet connection, but the conversation quickly turns political. As you talk, you both hear your teakettle whistling. Your mom interrupts the conversation and invites this otherwise stranger to join for tea. You talk about nothingness (and, of course, the lack of internet) for some twenty minutes, and she spots a book she has also read on your mother’s bookshelf. Your mother and her start talking about the book, the author, Persian history, tea and politics. It turns out they have so much more in common than they would have believed. “Like” — you think — and look for your phone for the first time in over half an hour.

Day Three.You turn on the TV only to see the face of the supreme leader giving a variation of the same speech he gave two days ago. You stand it for no more than three minutes and turn the thing off with a grin of disgust. You know 99 % of what you just heard is not true. Now you really want to know what is going on. But… there is no Internet. Two hours later, you hear a crowd chanting and look out the window. People are marching. In the distance, you hear gunshots and sirens. In the background scattered smoke columns. In the foreground, something more earthly, alien to all political ideologies: snow falls for the first time in the year. If this were a picture you would definitely give it a heart. 

Day Four. Setback. You’re anxious. You go back to checking your phone looking for connection every two minutes. You check The Facebook, Instagram, Twitter apps instinctively. All is frozen. No notifications on the main screen. No little red circles counting your messages on the corner of each app logo. You carry around the phone and are little ashamed to realize that you are a bit addicted to it. These features were designed to make you addicted after all. They activate the same region of the brain as chocolate, sex and heroin. The crowd chants, “Islamic Republic, we don’t want, we don’t want! Down with Khamenei” (https://twitter.com/HaddadEffat/status/1197564333078790144?s=20). 

Reconnection

Day Five.You knock on the door of your neighbor to ask her if she knows anything about the current situation (and… about the lack of internet connection). She’s actually getting ready to go out to find out about it. She convinces you to join her. Hashtag Affinity, you think. You walk together for seven blocks or so and everything is business as usual. People rushing to and from work and school. Leaving home in a rush, trying to get home in a rush. Nothing unusual. You walk for another ten minutes and find a traffic jam. Three blocks ahead you hear people chanting. You arrive at the corner, and there are hundreds of people carrying signs and umbrellas and chanting slogans and singing. In one of the crossings, there are broken chairs, old mattresses and trash containers piled up blocking the street. It is a barricade. There are improvised bonfires inside trash containers were people warm their hands, talk and smoke cigarettes. There are small groups. Some people are sharing stories and laughing, others are singing songs around the fire. Against the barricade, there are groups of younger women and men wearing kufiyas and winter hats. They’re mostly dressed in black. Suddenly, you start recognizing people. There are two friends from high school (which also happen to be Facebook friends with whom you have exchanged between 5 and 8 likes in the past twelve years). There is also a person that you only know from Facebook, you have never actually met in person. There are colleagues from work. The janitor from the building were you used to live three years ago, the secretary of your accountant, a university student that you always see smoking cigarettes in front of the corner store. You smile at them and they smile at you with complicity. You imagine them arriving at that corner also looking for clues about what is going on, after having given up on their cellphones. You talk to old acquaintances and make new friends. Your neighbor does too. You talk about the government, the price of gasoline and... well, the lack of Internet connection. It is way past midnight. You spent five hours there and they went like nothing. You don’t want to go home. 

Day Six.You arrive to the barricade late in the afternoon. Some people spent the night there. People are tired and yawning but in good spirit. People drink tea and have soup in paper cups and smoke around the bonfires. There are tents, sleeping bags and plastic tarps. It is an improvised encampment. Suddenly, you hear an explosion. Everybody crouches. And then another one. Two teargas cans fall in the middle of the intersection. People start coughing and choking. The people dressed in black go around with bottles of water rinsing peoples faces. It looks like they know what they’re doing. Gunshots start whistling around the barricade, hitting a mattress here, a lamppost there, grazing the shoulder of a barricader over there. Your Facebook friend pulls you down. “Watch out!” First time he ever speaks to you in person. You look at him with the face of the emoji with hearty eyes. You guard yourself against an old mattress. A short silence is quickly broken by another gunshot. A young man is hit in the calf. The bullet breaks both his tibia and fibula. You rush to help him. It’s the student who always smokes in front of the corner store. The fracture bleeds profusely. Two of your newly made friends lay him on the ground and your accountant’s secretary applies a tourniquet with a sock. You hold his head and rub his forehead as the boy screams in pain. From a hole in the barricade you can see that about twenty policemen, all dressed in riot gear get out of a van and walk towards the barricade. Some shoot teargas cans to the air. Others have clubs and plastic shields. Two of them carrying assault rifles flank the squad. They are both aiming at the barricade. The angry emoji of the red face cursing comes into your mind. Now you realize there is no way around it. You have to defend yourself. And, your friends. The flesh and bones type of friends. Molotov cocktails. One goes inside a car, one goes inside a truck and which are pushed in front of the barricade. One, two, three go over the barricade and explode in front of the police squad. They are followed by a rain of rocks. One after the other. For ten minutes there is not a single moment without a rock falling like hail on their heads. You see everybody you know in the barricade throwing rocks. You look at your own reflection on a display window and you find yourself also throwing rocks at the police. You don’t recognize yourself – because you recognize yourself in your reflection for the first time in your life. You are euphoric. You scream at them. You are using a feral voice that you don’t even recognize. You see a grandmother screaming at them too. You see a sixteen-year-old girl wearing a kufiya throwing a Molotov cocktail really far. You think she looks like an alabaster statue of a woman throwing the bullet in the Olympic Games. You get goosebumps. The bomb hits right in the middle of these people who have been shooting at you and that have left that student without a leg. A cloud of rocks follow, like a round of arrows going over medieval fort. Every single policemen is hit on the head at least once. The guy who was serving coffee and soup in paper cups comes out of the barricade and starts chasing them. He screams at them while crying and goes after them with suicidal courage. He is a kamikaze. Everybody follows him. Your neighbor follows him. You follow them. You feel alive. You are consumed by a fire that had been sleeping inside you since you were born. As you chase them, they run away and get inside the van and leave. Everybody screams and jumps. Some are weeping of joy. Everybody hugs everybody. Not a million hearts in Instagram can express how you feel. This deserves a picture. You realize you forgot your phone at home, but by now you don’t give a fuck about your phone or the Internet anymore. You don’t want to record life. You don’t want show life in a picture. You don’t want to click on an emoji to express how you feel about life. You want to live life.  

Day Seven.You are chanting. You are wearing a kufiya now. You dress all in black. You sail the river of people flowing through the streets of the city. You are part of this river, winding through the city like a snake. You are walking at the very front of the march. You hook your arms with your barricade comrades. You are a human chain walking shoulder to shoulder. You know from word of mouth now that what you lived just yesterday is happening all over Tehran and, in Isfahan and Shiraz, and in Karaj and Mashhad. Far in the distance, you see the riot police shooting rounds in the air again. But this time, you know they are terrified of you. You imagine them sweating and trembling inside their riot suits because they know their days are counted. Suddenly,  the Internet connection is back. You can now know what the world says about Iran. But only you know what really happened in Iran. You connected. You gave connection a new meaning. And, by new meaning you mean the old meaning of connection. Offline connection. Connection in space. Connection with people. Connection with real friends. Engagement, love, solidarity felt in hearts made of flesh. Connection Connection. Just out of curiosity, you browse Google News Iran. A little circle spinning in the centre of the screen: your phone is thinking. The connection is still slow. Finally some findings:

BBC: “After seven days of protests, Khamenei leaves the country. Syria gives asylum” Le Monde: “The Islamic Republic is no more.” The New York Times: “So-called ‘offline’ protests triumph in Iran.” Reuters: “The Persian Spring: The first ‘analogue’ revolution of the Twenty First Century.”

Wikispaces: How open-source theory can democratize public space planning.

There is a revived and ongoing debate about the meaning of publicness since the arrival of the internet. We have ubiquitous access to a non-hierarchical open system based on exchange, interconnection, coproduction and spontaneous organization. We understand this inextricably political concepts not by reading political or organizational theory, but by directly taking part in this network everyday. Our idea of open has expanded. Our idea of access has expanded. And, so has our idea of commons. Planners, designers, activists and ordinary citizens can now envision the possibility of opening, not only space itself, but also the design and planning of public spaces to the public.

The open-source paradigm has completely changed how we understand and conceptualize public space: The idea of a perpetually-editable, accessible-to-all and ever-evolving public space is now a provocation impossible to ignore. Open-source systems are powerful metaphors of the public realm and they offer useful interpretational tools to plan and design the city. The notion of wikis, is perhaps the most provoking image of all.  A wiki text (e.g. a Wikipedia article) can be created, complemented and modified by potentially anybody. It can also be linked to other related texts (i.e. hyperlinked). Conceiving a city as a series of interconnected spaces that are perpetually subject to transformation by its citizens forces a conversation that connects politics, planning and informatics.

While there are advancements in transforming democratic participation through the internet and social web (Mancini, 2015), in linking open-source and wiki systems to participatory design (Di Gangi, et al 2009, Aitamurto, et al, 2015) and architecture (West and O’mahony, 2008, Tato and Vallejo, 2012, Parvin, 2013, Di Quarto, et al, 2014), and in linking social struggles to planning and design (Hou, 2017, De la Llata, 2016, Knierbein, 2018, Alfasi, 2003), there has not been a transversal conversation that links the political, technological and design dimensions that are inherent to open-source planning. There is work that explores the notion of open-source architecture and wiki design (Salingaros, Mena-Quintero, 2010), that is to say, a design process that is open to the public. However, there is little inquiry on opening the actual making of public space to the public. But, can we conceive the idea of wikispaces? That is to say, a physical space whose material -- not only virtual -- development is open for transformation, as means to democratize public space planning and design. The challenges are political as much as they are technological and conceptual. The notion of wikispace raises a number of questions, such as: (1) How can we ensure that public spaces are the result of meaningful design contributions when design is open to all?, (2) Can wiki-systems ensure, not only democratic design processes, but also outcomes that reflect the needs and values of the potential users of urban spaces? as well as, (3) What is the role of knowledge and experts in the planning and design of a wiki public space and what are the implications for these professions? However, it also reveals enormous potential for bottom-up city-making. A wikispace “would not only be an open-source, but also an open-ended system. [And], as the system remains open for external inputs, the space constantly grows in complexity” (De la Llata, 2015: 3).

The internet is represented and conceived as a virtual image of real life. However, after two decades of iterating a parallel reality online, we begin to realize the potential of the opposite: testing the logics of — the best of — the internet in the physical urban world.

References:

Aitamurto, T., Holland, D. and Hussain, S., 2015. The Open Paradigm in Design Research. Design Issues, 31(4), pp.17-29.

De la Llata, S. (2017). Operation 1DMX and the Mexico City Commune: The Right to the City Beyond the Rule of Law in Public Spaces. In City Unsilenced (pp. 173-185). Routledge.

De la Llata, S. (2015). Open-ended urbanisms: Space-making processes in the protest encampment of the Indignados movement in Barcelona. Urban Design International, 21(2), 113-130.

Di Gangi, P.M. and Wasko, M., 2009. Steal my idea! Organizational adoption of user innovations from a user innovation community: A case study of Dell IdeaStorm. Decision Support Systems, 48(1), pp.303-312.

Di Quarto, G., Labate, A. and Malaspina, M., 2014. Open Source Architecture for" Nuovo CEP". In Advanced Engineering Forum (Vol. 11, pp. 171-176). Trans Tech Publications.

Hou, J. (Ed.). (2010). Insurgent public space: guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities. Routledge.

Mancini, P. (2013). Media fragmentation, party system, and democracy. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18(1), 43-60.

Salingaros, N. (2010). P2P Urbanism.

West, J. and O'mahony, S., 2008. The role of participation architecture in growing sponsored open source communities. Industry and innovation, 15(2), pp.145-168.