99% Invisible - 372- The Help-Yourself City

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.”  Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.”  Informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community that isn’t through city planning or some kind of official process. If you’ve put up a homemade sign warning people not to sit on a broken bench, that’s DIY urbanism. If you’ve used cones or a chair to reserve your own parking spot on a public street, that’s also DIY urbanism. Gordon Douglas has written a whole book about this idea called “The Help Yourself City.” It looks at all the ways people are taking matters into their own hands. Both for good reasons and for incredibly selfish ones. The Help-Yourself City

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's this idea in city planning called informal urbanism. Some people call it do it yourself urbanism. Basically informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community that isn't through city planning or some kind of official process. And if you think about it, this probably happens a lot where you live. If you put up a homemade sign warning people not to sit on a broken bench or that a parking meter isn't working, that's DIY urbanism. If you put out a set of cones or a chair to reserve yourself your own personal parking spot on a public street, you are a bad person.

But that is also DIY urbanism. Gordon Douglas has written a whole book about this idea. It's called The Help Yourself City. It looks at all the ways people are taking matters into their own hands, both for good reasons and for incredibly selfish ones. He's local to Oakland, so he came in here to the 99Pi HQ, and we had a great conversation all about the joy and chaos of DIY urbanism. And we started out by talking about one of the most perfect examples of the good kind of DIY urbanism.

A municipal failure that led to a DIY intervention and then to real permanent change. The Hellgate Bridge in Queens, New York. Well, so the Hellgate Bridge is this kind of enormous feat of engineering that was built to be one of these single strongest sort of structures in the known world at the time that it was built. I read once if all human life ceased to exist, it would still stand for some hundreds and hundreds of years with no maintenance whatsoever. The Hellgate Bridge is also a big kind of clunky old piece of infrastructure.

It's a railroad bridge. It had started to leak and crack and have little maintenance issues. Not the sort that we're going to cause any danger to anybody, but it was leaking all over the place down under its viaducts where normal New Yorkers were going about their days in Queens walking under these old archways. And in particular, a lot of folks in this part of Astoria noticed that there was this kind of scum they called it, a some sort of effluence kind of coming down out of the leak in the bridge.

That was probably just kind of rainwater runoff, trickling through a century of steel and other sort of stuff. And rust and right made it kind of nasty. And it was gross and it was running across the sidewalk. And so when it froze, it was super dangerous and slippery. And when it was warm out, it was just gross and green and kind of slimy. A handful of neighborhood folks got together with a couple other people and basically built a small bridge to go over this effluence. So it's a tiny bridge underneath the gigantic bridge.

Exactly. Just so pedestrians can walk over this river of scum that comes off of the bridge. That's right. Which they call the Astoria scum river bridge. And like, how why do we talking about this? The bridge of the scum river. I think it probably varies, but in, I think an athletic person could leap over it.

Yeah. And so why wasn't the city handling the scum river? Like, who was responsible for the scum river? Well, so there was a bit of, as is often the case with this kind of stuff, there's a bit of a lack of clarity in terms of who's responsible, right? Because some railroad company built this thing, right, along with the early public works, folks of New York City and all that, and then that street down there is the problem of the New York City Department of Transportation, right? So street down there is the problem of the New York City Department

of Transportation, right? So I think there was no clear answer. I also don't think that it was clear even who you might begin to complain about something like a leaky bridge too, and it caught a little bit of attention. It was actually very quickly responded to by the local councilman who wrote a letter like thanking them for their good citizenship. And you know, in fact, it was repaired quite quickly and has ceased to be an issue and the DIY bridge was dismantled. Right. And so this, this so embarrassed amtrak that they decided that they were going to fix it and they did.

Whatever repairs, which were probably minor, you know, that were needed, were made. The city council was pleased to have affected some change and made some people's lives better. And then they dismantled a bridge and then Jason and poster child and the other kind of folks who had done it dismantled it. Yeah, so you call these kind of interventions informal urbanism, but for informal urbanism to exist we have to talk about the rise of kind of urbanism in general. So how new is the concept of urban planning in an urbanism context? You know, it's really hard to put a pinn a date on some of this stuff, but we know that planning as a sort of professional vocation

and comes around along with a whole bunch of other professions in 18th and 19th centuries as cities kind of become more organized and science in general becomes more kind of rationalized, right? And you could look at ancient Rome and find analogs, and certainly there were aspects of planning always. But the idea that we might have a professional planner goes back to sort of 17th and 18th centuries as we started to deal with kind of chaotic cities. And the way that the planning profession understands itself is even more recent. As a reaction to the sort of chaos of the late 19th century city, the, you know, the London of Dickens, right, these massive, complicated, in many ways, terrible places, right, where there was a great deal of inequality and a great deal of suffering. So planning as a profession, especially in

the American context, emerges as a kind of response to social problems in the city and the idea that we can kind of rationalize this. And so then you have it becoming increasingly professionalized. You have the first sort of programs to train urban planners in the early 20th century, first official programs in urban design, as recently as like the 50s and 60s. And so while the city has always been this organic, complicated, human-made project, I think it does become increasingly professionalized in the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea, especially in the global North,

especially in North America, it became kind of increasingly surprising that somebody might take something like this into their own hands, because it had become such somebody else's job. Do these interventions happen because there's a lack of planning or because there's bad planning or what brings this on? People are out there living their lives in real public spaces, real urban spaces in ways

that a city planning department can't hope to, even if everybody lives in town, right? They don't walk the same streets the same way everybody does. They don't think about whether this curb is a little too high for a kid on a bike to get up, you know? It's a complex system. So it's like, you can't really fault someone for not knowing every permutation of a complex system. Right. Yeah.

No, totally. And I mean, the vast majority of this sort of infrastructure and stuff that planners work really hard to get built, including quite progressive pieces of, you know, bicycle facilities and things like that are wonderful and can't get done by me and my neighbor and a shovel, right? But, but there's also stuff that people notice. I mean, one of the things I mentioned kind of quickly is there's a street in Brooklyn near where I used to live where trucks were constantly parking on the sidewalk. In fact, that happens all over Brooklyn. It happens all over many cities. But if you're in a narrow street and you are making a delivery, you might think like actually the best move for me here is going to be to pull up onto this sidewalk to unload all

my crap and not block the street anymore. But it was damaging the sidewalk and ball bothering pedestrians and whenever and so somebody who I eventually tracked down worked in one of the local stores there, I had just made a sign that looked as professional as you can do with paint, you know, with your own materials that just said no parking on the sidewalk. Right. And it looked exactly like the one the city would put up if it were, except for that it wasn't on vinyl and it was like, you know,

it was just on cardboard or something like that. But they weren't trying to do anything cute. Yeah. It was just an effort to stop people from parking on the sidewalk. Yeah. And I see tons of that stuff. And it does get cute sometimes where they'll put, you know, DIY instead of the

D-O-T for a department of transportation. That was what some of these folks in Los Angeles who were painting their own bike lanes were doing. And so who are the people generally carrying out these kinds of interventions? I think that anybody living in a neighborhood has maybe some moments where they feel like, oh, I could fix that. Or maybe I should fix that. And I don't want to, I'm always careful to sort of remind people I'm speaking to that we clean our streets ourselves, right?

We sweep out front of our business if we're a business owner or we at least are supposed to keep up a sidewalk and do that kind of stuff. People put up signs in their neighborhoods about locks cats and people do tons of things to make their neighborhoods themselves. They also write graffiti all over the place, create roadside memorials, and do all sorts of things like that.

And I think that that stuff is just widespread across all cultures and classes and whatever. But I did find that most of the people creating the sort of visible do-it-yourself urban design interventions, those that really seem to be reflecting urban planning ideals and the sort of things that the city might really should be doing. City might not agree that they should be doing it, but people view it as the sort of thing a city could do. Even if you can tell in one glance that the city had nothing to do with it,

because it looks so scrappy, it's trying to kind of do that. Trying to make a statement, it's existence is making a statement. Sure, yeah. The more and more people I talk to who we're doing this, once you get beyond people who are maybe just kind of

repairing a pothole in their front yard or something like that, I found that the vast majority of people doing this looked like me. They were predominantly white, they were predominantly male, and a lot of them had backgrounds in design and planning and or at least some sort of professional education. And the additional point that I would make here is that a lot of them as a result of all that

and other things had quite a bit of privilege that they were kind of aware that they had, that I think whether they were thinking about it explicitly or not makes it a heck of a lot easier to go out and feel comfortable at three in the morning, painting a bike lane down a street or climbing a light post to hang up a sign, let alone impersonating a public works employee with an orange vest and wearing a hat and doing all this kind of stuff

that many of the folks I interviewed did. Once you hit that level of active DIY urbanism practice on the streets, they were overwhelmingly wonderfully intelligent and well-meaning, but very privileged and somewhat hubristic. Yeah, folks. You could interpret that two ways. One is, is that you could go. This represents a type of privilege that people should be mindful of, you know, the hubris that you mentioned. But also, I think it's incumbent on people with privilege to take action when that's what privileges should be for, rather than just resting and

profiting, you know, and so you could take that as the alternative. You know, for the most part, when we tell these stories of tactical urbanism and formal urbanism, they're fun and they kind of have a quality of being sort of just good, unalloyed good, you know, fixing the scum river problem is this is great. But interventions can have sort of a salt system and selfishness to them. Could you tell me about the bus stop in Seattle? I'm not sure. Yeah. So that's a great example of somebody who was, in a sense, while meaning, the story is that this man I know was living in Seattle and had begun to notice

that trash was piling up at the bus stop outside near his house. And he was frustrated by all this garbage and constantly feeling like he had to clean it up or walk over it and he realized that the city had failed to provide a trash can at the city provided bus stop. So he's emailing the city and calling the city, but after months and months of hearing nothing

and realizing, to his mind, there was just no chance they were ever in a response to that, right? So he went out in the middle of the night with a bolt cutter and just cut off the bus stop and threw it in the bushes. And this is like one of these like kind of eight-foot poles that just says bus stop. Yeah, bus number whatever. It wasn't like a bench or a little shelter or anything. It's just a pole that had a bus of number, whatever. It wasn't like a bench or a little shelter or anything. It's just a pole that had a bus stop number on it.

Right. So he cut the whole pole down and threw it in the bushes. You know, he pointed out to me that for instance, there was another bus stop not too far up the road. Why wasn't it his impulse to put a trash can in there? That's a great question. So I asked him that. I said, well, why if you were going to go in this trouble? Why not? And he said, oh, I thought about that. He had a great question. So I asked him that. I said, well, why if you were going to go to

this trouble? Why not? And he said, oh, I thought about that. He had a whole design. He was going to get a little like a chicken wire thing and kind of wrap it around that. Sure. But he pointed out probably quite rightly that the city would not know it was there. And nobody would come empty that garbage can out. And so he'd be still stuck. I'm seeing how this is garbage, which you know, you could argue is better than removing a bus stop. Okay, so you, so you remove the bus stop. The bus stop stopping there, which is amazing to me that the, that the bus driver is looking for those cues in the environment

and just to know to stop there if there is a sign there. Yeah, I mean, it's not like I don't, I don't believe they stopped immediately, but I think over time. Yeah. But then, you know, the city came immediately, but I think over time. Yeah, but then you know The city came in and put another bus stop in yeah, and he decided not to remove it I mean the kind of act which might be you know to own us and I don't want a empty city trash either yeah

It's to put a trash can there and then empty the trash can but that type of act strikes me as Privilege taken too far. Mm-hmm. Sure. I mean there there are also, I mean, to take a more extreme example, there are people who paint red curbs gray to create parking spaces for themselves, right? Put trash cans on top of fire hydrants to create parking spaces that appear to be legal. I spent quite a bit of time learning about these variety of Malibu home owners who've been trying to stop people from using the public access to the beach in Malibu through all sorts of stuff that is essentially the more anti-social equivalent of all the stuff we've been talking about there.

They're putting up gates, they're putting up signs that say private beach, they're hiring private security. But a bike lane is like you you were putting it there for the benefit of, hopefully, lots of lots of bicyclers, but blocking off a beach in Malibu or painting your own private curb is really just for yourself. Yeah, it is. I mean, some of these interventions are even more complicated in terms of just like being either selfish or selfless. I mean, another one of these I thought was really interesting was the DIY bus benches interventions are even more complicated in terms of just like being either selfish or selfless.

I mean, another one of these I thought was really interesting was the DIY bus benches in Los Angeles that they put there to fix the lack of public seating because a lot of the times advertisements pay for the public seating in the places that the population doesn't have as desirable to advertisers, then there's no benches. And so they put in benches, but that's complicated because it's not a matter of just putting in benches, you actually have to take care of benches.

Yeah, that's right. And so I should say, it's now the case that there are some stipulations of like where, if you're an advertising company, you have to put benches in there. But yes, huge amounts of Los Angeles are these kind of long, stark, hot boulevards where people rely heavily on the bus, and there is no shelter, no seat, no nothing.

Again, all across the city, people have built these benches. They're just places to sit while you're waiting for the bus. Sometimes they're just literally a chair that somebody has hauled out there or maybe found in the trash and put there. But yeah, the problem with this, and this goes back to just how complicated all this stuff is and whether any of these things can really be purely altruistic because once you have put something out there, good old fashioned urban planners have to deal with it or good old fashioned street maintenance people have to deal with it.

I also spoke to a lot of planners for the book and they would say you know the problem with this is that somebody's gonna get a splinter in there but at some point and then it's gonna be our problem, right? Or whose problem it at the very least if it's not our problem, it's gotta be somebody because this thing is gonna slowly deteriorate over the winter and the concern would be that there's not a lot of forethought. There are people out there who also just do DIY maintenance. I talked to one guy who goes out and fixes playgrounds all over the place for no recognition whatsoever.

So maybe they could get together. But I think in the next episode. That's right. But in the meantime, that is one of those often unselibrated things that good old fashioned bureaucracy gets done, just like ideally. I mean, more in some cities than in others. But theoretically, the city is maintaining public infrastructure.

Do sometimes these DIY interventions and what someone wants in the city and then another person wants in a city Come into conflict with each other So certainly I think oftentimes these things will be more reflective of one person's priority than another Which is kind of again, not that bureaucratic planning is perfect But at least it's ostensibly has a democratic process behind it, right? Right? For instance kind of my favorite example is also in Brooklyn, Bedford Avenue, right,

which is one of the longest streets in New York City and had one of the longest bike lanes in New York City on it. And at a certain point, it passes through the predominantly Hasidic community in South Williamsburg. And the Sautmar Hacita didn't like all of the people biking through this neighborhood for a variety of reasons, but pretty clearly, and I think not, they didn't try to disguise this as something else, said they didn't like that there was a lot of scantly clad, young hipster types, biking through their neighborhood.

And they were able to get that bike lane removed for those blocks through South Williamsburg, which of course incensed those in the more activist cycling community who threatened all sorts of things, including a naked bike ride through the neighborhood, which never actually materialized. But there was at that time a great deal of tension. This was seen as a real kind of a front to the cycling community, which I think, you know, politics aside,

it was truly a major bike route. Yeah. But it was gone and it was taken away legally due to the political pressure from the community that it went through. And so then you had some do-it-yourselfers out there in the middle of the night trying to re-stripe this by the way. Yeah, that makes sense. And they then were apprehended by the showroom, which is the I would say DIY police

force of the Hacita community, right? Yeah, who I mean, in that community is full of DIY for lack of a better word, efforts from local signage, which I've seen just on all levels, signage about how to park properly in the neighborhood, like encouraging people to park efficiently, so there's many spaces possible I've seen that, to stuff that's more controversial, there's been articles written about signage that goes up that instructs, say, women to walk on one side of the streets and other kinds of cultural things that are happening in that community. So their own neighborhood police force actually stopped these, do it

yourself by claim folks, and held them until the NYPD could come and people were arrested. And so you really did have kind of like a DIY on DIY situation. There's the best of my knowledge. There's still no bike lane through those blocks of South Williamsburg on Bedford. Gordon Douglas and I talk about the uptick and DIY urbanism and the lessons cities are taking from the movement. After this. Why is it, do you think that we've seen a kind of uptick

in informal urbanism? And do you think it says something about the way our cities are now? So I think that there are two things that play. One is perhaps a more organic natural reaction to how professionalized urban space had become. Simply people recognizing that not everything can be handled by this very professionalized state planning apparatus and they see stuff that they can fix.

Tied to that I think is at least over the last 10 years but even more so over the last kind of 40 we've seen a lot of ups and downs in the physical health of our cities, right? You have moments of this stuff in the 60s and 70s when cities were really being neglected. And that's when some of the early examples, especially things like guerrilla gardening come about, in the context of a ton of vacant lots

and a ton of vacancy. And again, in the 2008 housing crisis and financial crisis, and recession, that's when I was doing a lot of my research was kind of on the tail end of that. I don't think that it's all a reaction to like cities having no money and not being able to do it, but that is a broad trend. Even now, in a strong economy, cities don't have the money that other entities have. And they have to rely on things like advertising companies to build their bus shelters, right? And I think that brings me to the sort of second point, which is

that we live in an era in which we have sort of decentralized a lot of this stuff, or neoliberalized, if you will. A lot of our public services and a lot of the basic responsibilities for getting our cities to run and to look nice. And we rely on a developer to build a park. And we rely on a developer to fund a school or whatever because we can't tax ourselves properly and we don't have the services ourselves. We don't have the resources to do it as cities. And so kind of doesn't matter about the broader economic situation.

We're just in this kind of neoliberal moment. Do it yourselfers are kind of in some ways perfect neoliberal actors, right? It's easy to view them as these kind of great community-oriented grassroots good Samaritans. But they're also just individuals doing what they think is best and what the state isn't doing. And so they're taking it into their own hands, and that's kind of inspiring, but also like the perfect example of a very individualistic society in which the state is not doing anything. And they don't have any more oversight than like a corporate developer, you know, doing

some big, big, and we always bemoan this idea that the state isn't regulating development enough or something like that, or at least those of us on the left in planning to. And yet this is kind of a similar situation. It looks a lot smaller, but there's certainly no more democratic oversight over any of these folks doing this kind of stuff. Right. You have to sort of address or you have to assess each individually if it conforms to your

values of that type of. That's a huge point. I mean, I think we do really have to assess these individually. And that's why I think that this question of kind of legitimacy is kind of more important than the question of whether or not something is formal or informal or legal or illegal is just whether it's an appropriate fit. And that's squishy. That's very difficult to deal with in planning, right? For sure.

But we can begin to figure it out when we talk to people, and that's why community participation is so, so important. And whenever we're reshaping urban space publicly or, you know, formally or informally. urban space publicly or, you know, formally or informally. Could you talk about how the formal structures of urban planning taken some of the lessons of, you know, individual interventionism to create spaces differently than they maybe used to? Like, I feel like I've noticed this. There used to be like what a public square was and it was very, it's like columns and marble and stuff.

And now it's folding chairs. How have you seen the results like feedback into the formalized urban planning community? Yeah, I think that's absolutely the case. And it's another part of your answer of kind of why are we seeing an uptick in this now to the extent that we are. I think it has less to do with there being some moment

than that these tactics, and in particular, these aesthetics of kind of DIY culture, have become very trendy and mainstream. So for instance, you have really, I think, mainly positive urban trends toward walkability, livability, pedestrian public spaces, complete streets, and in particular trends like tactical urbanism, right? At every scale, but all the way up to New York City's Department of Transportation, employing the ideals of tactical urbanism and the aesthetics of tactical urbanism to change, say, Times Square, right, from a big complicated road intersection to a very different pedestrian plaza. Right.

Can you, some of you who hasn't seen Times Square recently, could you describe what is in Times Square right now? Sure. So actually right now it is becoming increasingly formalized. So kind of back to your question of what it looks like. But it is now a large pedestrian plaza. There is a little bit of access allowed down a very narrow Broadway that's mainly good for delivery vehicles and bikes. And now just an enormous public plaza surrounded by enormous screens and advertising and all

the other stuff that Times Square is about. And it really started with like folding chairs and very simple but city-sanctioned intervention. Totally. Yeah. And it was it was the DOT doing it, but they took this act first and asked questions later attitude of like, because they knew there was a ton of opposition and they just went in there, shut it down. And we see the same thing in San Francisco

with the pavement to parks program. The huge proliferation of parklets now, everywhere, San Jose, Oakland, Oakland's own Lafam Square was briefly attempted to be transformed in this way. Right. Could you describe the Lafam Square example? Sure.

It's a triangular flat iron sort of situation where there's a very flat iron-esque building in a triangular piece of land where telegraph splits away from Broadway in downtown Oakland. And there has been a public space there, but there was this idea that they ought to shut down about a block of telegraph so that Broadway could continue straight and a new pedestrian space would open up right there. And this was actualized here in Oakland,

and the resulting plaza had all the kind of trappings of these contemporary tactical public spaces that we're talking about. It had a lot of reclaimed wood kind of aesthetics. It had a lot of adorandic chairs or folding chairs of some sort. This is where you would imagine to see the ping pong table that's been brought out as a public amenity, the piano that's been, you know, randomly appeared in a place to reveal to play.

It's part of this broader trend of creative place making that is increasingly dominant in urban planning and place making. And I think that the spirit of tactile urbanism remains incredible, which is quite simply, let's act quickly and cheaply to prototype something awesome and then try to get it made more permanent. But the kind of aesthetics that have gone along with it that borrow a lot from DIY have become kind of what these places are supposed to look like.

So that parklets now up and down, Valencia and San Francisco have this very similar aesthetic. Most of them have bike parking, Most of them have reclaimed wood. Most of them have some sort of planter kind of a situation. They also basically serve as sidewalk cafes more than as public spaces, or at least they have that potential. And I think that that potential is so realized

that I don't even know, like there's one in the sort of gourmet ghetto area, Berkeley, in front of Saul's. I think of that as seating for Saul's. But by definition, cannot be. It is a public space. It's a public space. It's a public space that anyone could sit down at.

But the visual cues of that space are not that anyone could actually sit down in them. That's right. And I think that's one of the problems of the aesthetics of these types of interventions that are done by the city is that they, yeah, they create more public space, but what they define as the proper use of the public is coded into the language of the way the space looks to me anyway. On the other hand, I think that cities are learning a different lesson, which is that the aesthetics of this stuff are increasingly trendy.

And as you pointed out, they look like places of consumption, not a true public space, which for better or worse, a true public space is a place that I can roll up with my shopping cart and just sit there, if that's all I've got. And I can throw up protest. And I can, I don't know, do all the other stuff that you're supposed to do in public space. And if they don't look like that, and they serve much more to just catalyze

the economic development or sell overpriced coffee, then that's not the best lesson. I think for how we should be remaking our public spaces. Thank you so much for talking, I really enjoyed. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Gordon Douglas's book is called The Help Yourself City. Get it, you'll like it. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Chris Baroube and Kurt Colestead, music by Sean Riel.

Katie Mingle is the senior producer. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Sharif Yusif, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of radio topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on the show at 99PI org or on Instagram and Reddit too. But we have links and pictures to the DIY urbanism projects we talked about on this episode at 99pi.org Radio to PO From PRX you