Tactical Urbanism with CoDesign

“In Australia there’s this perception that if you remove a carpark the sky will fall, but if we can create a positive experience of something without cars, it shifts opinion.”

CoDesign’s focus is on reinventing neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood block is how we experience the city, it’s where we live, it’s where we build connections, and it’s where we spend money. Typically the plan and design process looks at communities on the block or the street level but when you start to look at whole neighbourhoods it looks messy and complex with so many different perspectives and agendas. There are two different types of city making, the hardware being the buildings and the street forms and the software being the culture, identity, user behaviour and experience. It’s not a new concept, but there’s always a perception that if you get the hardware right, the software will automatically follow. However, if that were the case we wouldn’t have the issues of dormant spaces many cities have. Focusing on the hardware gets us a lot of the way, but often we don’t spend enough time thinking about user behaviour and culture.

CoDesign is involved with ephemeral and low cost building projects to bring people together and create something in the city that’s authentic, that has an identity about that place and helps to build. It can reinvent that sense of local neighbourhood.

We’ve traditionally worked a lot with councils, but increasingly with property developers both in the inner and outer city regions. Councils are interested in how we make our neighbourhoods more sustainable and inclusive which usually falls under community engagement or urban design, but with property developers it’s more about place activation, helping them to plan for places that will be more authentic and interesting through place strategy or activating space once it’s been built. The ongoing question is how do we create a community as quickly and as early as possible?

The method we use is called Tactical Urbanism. We’re good at thinking about the big picture and the twenty-year plan but where we sometimes fall down is the delivery tactics. Tactical Urbanism describes the approach to neighbourhood building that uses low cost, urban experiments that catalyse long term urban change. It’s never the end game, it’s low cost pop-ups and turning car parks into green spaces, things like that. The aim is to change behaviour, change experience, change the identity of a place and influence a long-term plan.

The best global example of that is Times Square, New York. Since 1969 there’s been a planning strategy to pedestrianise Broadway, but every time someone tried it got knocked back for various reasons. Not much happened until 2011 when residents connected via a Twitter campaign, got camping chairs, sat down and closed the street for the day. That visual picture, even though it was low cost, short term changed behaviour, the city government took notice and then installed a three-month trial plaza using paint and folding chairs to experiment with what it would be like. They used a lot of measured evidence on the site, traffic flow, pedestrian use, how it effected local traders and they found trade was up 20-40%. Car accidents went down between 11-30%. If they just closed it to build the $5m plaza they’re now building you probably wouldn’t of had that kind of positive cultural behaviour reaction, it would have been too sudden, too difficult a change. Equally you could use the approach to test something that might not work, but it’ll only cost you $20,000, not $20 million. The value of the trials is you get your early adopters, then you have this really great feedback you can put into what ever comes next.

Love is the harmony desire is the key, Buyalex, Flickr

It’s about highest and best use of land, so instead of sitting there vacant, a space could be earning money, it could be contributing positively for that time, then you can take it down in a weekend if you need to.

A lot of people think this is only suitable to inner urban areas because that’s where most of the examples have been but it’s not, it’s an approach to bring people together to use spaces in a new way. At the moment we’re working in an outer urban greenfield site on a community engagement strategy, building on the place brand with people already living there. Community infrastructure is expensive and often doesn’t arrive with the first residents, which is understandable, there’s naturally economies of scale. But we can simulate the same pattern of use without expensive infrastructure, providing the service upfront and establishing the social cohesion and connections people need to build that place identity, which can then transition into something more permanent down the track.

In the inner city on the other-hand, it’s often a catch-22. There’s a requirement for street facing retail in most developments but it’s often built before there’s a market to support that retail. In the interim, how do we make a place active and interesting at ground level and contribute back to the city? There are a range of different things that dormant space could be. The first step is starting with people, what skills and resources do we have right here that could be supported? Here’s someone that wants to start a co-working space and they happen to live in the building, lets facilitate them to do it rather than establishing another program that won’t neccessarily guarantee community buy-in.

Better Blocks Masterclass in Melbourne

We’re also working with VicHealth to bring greater activity into communities, so yoga in the street, dance in the street etc. By providing the base level space, there’ll always be arts organisations who will be interested.

The biggest challenge we have is permits, approvals and management of these spaces. There’s lots of council interest but it rarely fits inside a permit format- it’s not a park, a building or an event so by default the answer is usually no.

The importance of bringing a local community on board with what’s happening. As with any project that’s not well consulted on, a project can be rejected if it’s not appropriate for that space and that community. While we haven’t had that feedback directly, we have had some difficult community engagement sessions trying to understand why car parks will be taken away, even if it’s only for 3 months.

Melbourne Masterclass

Another project we’re working on is changing space programming as in, this day it’s a road, this day it’s a play space. Again it’s not a new concept, Play Streets are very popular in the UK, but it’s difficult to adopt in Australia because we have a different regulatory framework. We’re doing a pilot in Melbourne’s Kensington and the aim is to use the pilot evidence to run a national program. Playing cricket in the street of course doesn’t require a program, but the program is important to ensure council has the right level of risk comfort to allow that to happen on a regular basis. It also works to ensure communities have the right tools and resources to start one in their own streets within councils across the country. It’s about getting people back into the street and making it easy enough that you can fill in a one-page form and bypass street party permits and hundreds of thousands of dollars in public liability insurance. The actual risk is low but the perceived risk is quite high. Once we establish a few precedents it will unlock a lot of rigidity with council permits.

Sydney Masterclass

Lucinda is the Co-Founder and CEO of Co-Design Studio, she trained in urban design, spent 2 years working in south East Asia in slum resettlement and is currently on the youth advisory board for UN-HABITAT.

CoDesign is working towards St Kilda’s Acland St revitalisation project, where they’re intending to do a series of closures, paint the road, invite people into the street to use the street in a different way.