Article

Journal of Planning History

2015, Vol. 14(2) 135-148
ª 2014 The Author(s)
Do-it-Yourself Urbanism: Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
A History DOI: 10.1177/1538513214549325
jph.sagepub.com

Emily Talen1,2

Abstract
In the last several years, interest has surged in the idea of small-scale, incremental, ‘‘do-it-yourself’’
(DIY) urban improvement. Also known as ‘‘tactical,’’ ‘‘pop-up,’’ or ‘‘guerilla’’ urbanism, this brand of
urban intervention is resident-generated, low budget, and often designed to be temporary. The
approach is distinguished by being in direct opposition to top-down, capital-intensive, and bureau-
cratically sanctioned urban change of the kind most often associated with urban planning. The purpose
of this article is to review the broader, historical rootedness of these efforts. DIY urbanism has been
energized by a recession and a ‘‘right to the city’’ spirit of guerrilla tactics, but it is actually rooted in a
deeper tradition of nineteenth-century civic engagement. Focusing on the American experience,
I show that the idea of bottom-up, tactical, DIY urbanism forms an essential tradition in American
urbanism, an impulse that runs counter to the narrative of urban abandonment, and as such forms
an essential platform upon which notions of any ‘‘back to the city’’ movement draw support.

Keywords
tactical urbanism, DIY urbanism, planning history

In the last several years, interest in the idea of small-scale, incremental, ‘‘do-it-yourself’’ (DIY)
urban improvement in the United States has surged. Also known as ‘‘tactical,’’ ‘‘pop-up,’’ or
‘‘guerilla’’ urbanism, this brand of urban intervention is resident-generated, low budget, often
temporary, and has been described as a process whereby ‘‘community activists are taking city
planning into their own hands.’’1 The movement equates urbanism with the physical realm, assert-
ing that small-scale intervention in material form—including the processes involved in generating
physical change—has the power to significantly impact the everyday lives of urban residents.
Sometimes drawing inspiration from theorists like Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, improve-
ments in the built environment are purposefully ‘‘provisional’’ and ‘‘opportunistic,’’ orchestrated
by grassroots urban activists intent on operating outside of neoliberal redevelopment policies.2
Swimming pools are made out of dumpsters, furniture (including pianos) appear on the sidewalk,
parking spaces are converted into temporary parks, and vacant lots are reinvented as ad hoc

1
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
2
School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:
Emily Talen, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, and School of Sustainability, Arizona State University,
PO Box 875302, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
Email: etalen@asu.edu
136 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

Figure 1. Under DIY Urbanism, parking spaces are transformed into temporary pocket parks. Photo courtesy
of parkingday.org. DIY ¼ do-it-yourself.

markets, gardens, or art installations (Figures 1 and 2). In developing countries, unauthorized use
of public space is often standard protocol3—but in advanced capitalist democracies like the United
States, such practices seem revolutionary.
For the most part, the approach is distinguished by being in direct opposition to top-down,
capital-intensive, and bureaucratically sanctioned urban change of the kind most often associated
with urban planning. In the US case, this signals a disinterest—or perhaps disillusionment—with
changes promised through more conventional routes like tax increment financing districts, design
guidelines, or comprehensive planning. It has been described as an attempt to ‘‘skirt authority’’ that
signals a restive public not content to wait for planners and architects to accomplish better living
environments.4 In some cases, citizen groups are working to secure microloans to do the work that,
in previous eras, planners might have undertaken themselves.5
These various grassroots efforts vary widely in their level of radicalism, their commitment to
addressing social inequality, and the degree to which they are sanctioned by those in power. Some-
times, the strategies are more ‘‘guerilla-like’’ in that they are orchestrated on public or even private
Talen 137

Figure 2. ‘‘DIY: Streets, Outdoor Living Rooms.’’ From ‘‘DIY Urbanism’’ by the San Francisco Planning and
Urban Research Association. The caption reads, ‘‘The second generation of furniture recreates the front stoops
and sidewalk benches where historically community residents gathered.’’ DIY ¼ do-it-yourself. Source: spur.org.

land without prior approval, while others are more mainstream. In the latter category are groups like
Portland’s ‘‘City Repair Project,’’ the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative’s ‘‘Pop-Up City,’’ or
citizen interventions suggested by the Project for Public Places. These can hardly be viewed as
radical and essentially provide suggestions for direct resident involvement in public space improve-
ment—for example, the ‘‘pop-up café’’ in a parking space or small art installations designed to
reinvigorate public space.6 The degree to which these efforts have been compromised because of
their co-opting by mainstream media and other commercial interests, potentially undermining the
radicalism of ‘‘unauthorized forays’’ on vacant land, remains a heated question.7
In the United States where small-scale appropriation of space seems novel (unlike in other parts
of the world), articles are beginning to document the phenomenon. A new book Cartopia documents
the ‘‘food cart revolution’’ in Portland.8 The magazine Miller-McClune recently reviewed the rise of
‘‘tactical urbanism,’’ the title of a document widely distributed on the web offering twelve ‘‘tactics’’
ranging from ‘‘mobile vendors’’ to ‘‘chair bombing.’’ The New York Times has featured reviews of
‘‘temporary’’ and guerilla urbanism, while a three-part series called ‘‘The Interventionist’s Toolkit’’
in the journal Places reviewed the current status of the movement, chronicling, from an architect’s
perspective, ‘‘the tactical multiplicity and inventive thinking that have cropped up in the vacuum of
more conventional commissions.’’9
The purpose of this article is not to sort out the varying social purposes and degrees of radicalism
inherent in different forms of citizen-led urban interventions and unsanctioned appropriations of
space. Rather, my purpose is to review the broader, historical rootedness of these efforts. Today’s
DIY urbanism is aimed at reactivating existing urban places in the midst of a recession, but the more
general phenomenon of resident activism and civic engagement conducted outside the domain of
government or corporate sponsorship is not so new.
Often the roots of the approach are posited in the 1970s, when for example the landscape architect
Karl Linn mapped out a strategy for citizen activists to create instant public spaces (the ‘‘neigh-
borhood commons’’) on vacant inner-city land. Others point to the 1990s, when followers of
‘‘Everyday Urbanism’’ similarly invoked bottom-up appropriation of space for cultural expressions
of ‘‘the everyday’’ in a way that rejected formalism and celebrated improvisational improvement.10
138 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

These were important iterations of the idea, but this article recounts an even earlier past. From a
broader perspective, it is possible to view DIY urbanism as the latest chapter in a long-standing
interest in making cities more humane, authentic, and livable through the actions of individuals and
small groups rather than the actions of governments or corporations. These efforts began well before
the arrival of government-sanctioned urban planning, and thus they are not linked by their reaction
against establishment practices. With the exception of large-scale master planning in the world’s
capital cities, urban improvement in the nineteenth century was by necessity small scale, incre-
mental, and undertaken by individuals or small associations. But whether operating before or outside
the boundaries of conventional urban planning practice, the efforts have in common an enthusiasm
for urban regeneration from the bottom-up.
This article shows that while DIY urbanism has been energized by economic recession and a
‘‘right to the city’’ spirit of guerrilla tactics, it is also rooted in a deeper tradition of self-help urban
activism. Focusing on the American experience, I show that the idea of bottom-up, tactical, DIY
urbanism forms an essential tradition in American urbanism, an impulse that runs counter to the
narrative of urban abandonment, and as such forms an essential platform upon which notions of any
‘‘back to the city’’ movement draw support. It speaks to an enduring optimism about the city that
continues to invoke a spirit of renewal and reinvention in the early twenty-first century, just as it
did more than a century ago.
In the following sections, I trace the lineage of DIY urbanism, arguing that out of these historical
strains our current notions of bottom-up, grassroots urban activism emerged. The lineage starts with
beautification efforts and physical improvement tied to social redemption, evolving toward a more
theoretically driven notion of urban conservation and complexity. These approaches were varied and
do not constitute a singular, totalizing vision—rather, there are aspects of each that can be connected
to current DIY urbanism efforts.

DIY Urbanism since the Nineteenth Century

Ideas for urban improvement that focused on small-scale, incremental change began in the nine-
teenth century as a politically popular version of Jeffersonian self-government, applied to urban
places rather than the rural hinterland. It was a time in which, as historian Carl Smith’s study of
Chicago revealed, ‘‘reality, city, and disorder became closely related, if not interchangeable.’’11 This
disorder came to be regarded as defining the status quo of urban experience, and it is this orientation
that set the stage for the initial impulses of DIY urbanism.
The ‘‘many changes by many hands’’ method of urban improvement included civic improvement
groups, municipal arts societies, settlement house workers, neighborhood guilds, and a whole range
of individuals and groups trying to make cities more livable. Importantly, these efforts began before
a time when there was such a thing as a professional ‘‘planner,’’ and city plans were a relative
novelty. And, unlike urban reformers like Ebenezer Howard and Daniel Burnham, small-scale urban
improvers made no attempts to radically alter the structure of cities. Instead of plans, the improve-
ment of cities was predicated on individual, entrepreneurial intervention. While cognizant that the
shape of the city was molded by larger economic and political forces, nineteenth-century DIY urban-
ism stressed the role that individuals and civic groups could have in shaping city form. Within this
orientation—that is, that individual forces rather than governments and corporations could be rallied
to enact change—changes were necessarily small and incremental.

Beautifiers and Redeemers

The United States was urbanizing rapidly in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Chicago, for
example, increased in population sixty-fold between 1850 and 1900. Sudden growth, along with the
Talen 139

centripetal and centrifugal effects of new transportation systems that allowed both dispersal and
congestion, seemed to make American cities ‘‘hostile to traditional ideas of order and stability.’’12
From an urban environmental quality point of view, official responses were weak. There were efforts
to improve drinking water, control contagious disease, and improve sewerage systems in cities, but
beyond ensuring a minimum standard of public health and safety, city planning—especially the
improvement of the public realm—was limited to controlling the width and arrangement of streets
and, to a more limited degree, the distribution of open spaces.13
The helter-skelter of unregulated municipal expansion motivated the first round of DIY urban-
ism. It was initially aimed at beautification as opposed to social welfare: incremental, small-scale
improvements that would make cities, it was thought, better places to live and better attractors of
capital investment. According to Peterson, there were three strains, all of which preceded the City
Beautiful movement—municipal art, civic improvement, and outdoor art.14 Each revealed a concern
for civic spirit, beauty, artfulness, order, and cleanliness. Overall, the primary solution to urban
disorder was beautification in small ways.
New York City’s municipal arts movement, started in the 1890s, was in this strain, although, given
its backing by elites, could not be considered ‘‘bottom-up.’’ But a connection can be drawn in terms of
scale. The movement focused on small-scale adornment and decorative art—stained glass and murals
in public buildings and sculpture and fountains in public places. Municipal art proponents detested
overt signs of urban decay or crass commercialism—litter and billboards—and pushed instead for
plaza entryways, triumphal arches, monuments in public squares, and embellished bridges.
Though the objective was to get municipal government involved in art patronage—a different
goal than today’s DIY urbanism—the municipal arts movement sought to improve the city’s appear-
ance through what Peterson called ‘‘activated urbanity’’ rather than any grand planning schemes.
Urban diversity was valued from an aesthetic point of view, and municipal artists were known to
condone the ‘‘judicious use of color’’ as a way to enliven the street.15 Some proponents wanted
municipal art to be colorful in the sense of being indigenous. Frederick S. Lamb argued in 1897 that
art must appeal to the great masses of the public. It must ‘‘tell the story of the human heart,’’ whereby
‘‘the daily struggle of the individual is felt and recorded.’’16
A second category of small-scale beautification is referred to as civic improvement. Focusing on
cleanliness, order, and beauty, its lineage is traced to Andrew Jackson Downing (see Note 27), who
was especially committed to the planting of trees. By the 1890s, hundreds of mostly women-led
village improvement societies had been formed throughout the country, predominantly in small and
medium-sized cities. These groups later organized, and a convention in Springfield in 1900 led to the
creation of the National League of Improvement Associations (later renamed the American League
for Civic Improvement). By 1906, Charles Mulford Robinson reported that there were some 2,400
improvement societies in the United States. What had started after the Civil War as a movement
devoted to small-scale urban improvement was leading toward the new profession of ‘‘city
planning.’’ In his second major work, Modern Civic Art, Robinson’s explicit theme was the need
to organize small-scale improvements into a harmonious general plan.17
Before this merger with municipal planning, however, the concerns of the improvement societies
were eclectic, involving, for example, ‘‘the digging of anything from a sewer to a flower bed.’’18
Like the municipal arts movement, civic improvers were devoted to urban improvement on a
block-by-block, lot-by-lot basis—providing rubbish boxes, ornamental lampposts and street trees,
and agitating for litter cleanup, noise and smoke abatement, and the beautification of vacant property
(see Figures 3 and 4). There was a strong sense of collective responsibility for the condition of cities,
what Daphne Spain, in How Women Saved the City, refers to as the ‘‘voluntary vernacular.’’19
Between the Civil War and World War I, women’s groups were involved in a wide variety of
neighborhood-level improvements that, although strongly motivated by moral redemption, were
confined to small-scale urban improvement.
140 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

Figure 3. Fountains were added by civic improvement groups, like this one in Montgomery, AL, photographed
in 1900. Source: Cynthia Read-Miller, 1988, Main Street, U.S.A. in Early Photographs; NY: Dover Publications.

Figure 4. Oakland, CA, 1900, showing civic improvement in the form of statuary and a gazebo. Source: Cynthia
Read-Miller, 1988, Main Street, U.S.A. in Early Photographs; NY: Dover Publications.

These groups considered the ‘‘inspired scene painting, static and splendid’’ of the Columbian
Exposition of 1893 an unrelated endeavor: ‘‘While Daniel Burnham was busy trying to create cities
from whole new cloth, women volunteers were strengthening the existing urban fabric by focusing
not on commerce and large public spaces, but on daily life and the neighborhood.’’20 Jane Addams’
work in Hull House is perhaps the best example. The settlement house movement and its brand of
reform were morally heavy-handed, but its commitment to the relevance of small urban change
gives it a role in the lineage of DIY urbanism. The effects were immediate—parks, playgrounds,
baths, and other facilities at the neighborhood level. Hull House produced a series of firsts: the first
public baths, first public playground, first public gymnasium, first small theater, first public kitchen,
Talen 141

Figure 5. ‘‘The Playground,’’ an essential part of early twentieth-century social reform. From Graham Taylor’s
Chicago Commons: A Social Center for Civic Co-operation, 1904.

first group work school, first painting loan program, first free art exhibit, first fresh air school, and
first public swimming pool.21 Provision of these neighborhood-based public facilities was thought to
be the physical articulation of community-building (Figure 5).
Beyond neighborhood facilities, public art was also considered essential. Jacob Riis, also in the
redemptive vein, believed in art as a positive influence, and Greenwich House in New York City
became an important outlet for neighborhood music and handicrafts. Art was to be ‘‘of the people’’
rather than imposed from above. A strong case was made for the importance of vernacular art in
Ellen Gates Starr’s article ‘‘Art and Labor,’’ published in 1895 in Hull-House Maps and Papers:
‘‘Let us admit that art must be of the people if it is to be at all . . . no man can execute artistically
what another man plans.’’

Conservation and Complexity

A different strain of small-scale urban improvement that can be linked, at least conceptually, to
today’s DIY urbanism begins with Camillo Sitte and his influential 1889 book, City-Building
According to Artistic Principles. At that time, a great deal of demolition was occurring in older Eur-
opean urban centers in order to accommodate expansion of the industrial complex, alleviate conges-
tion, and link central cores to surrounding fringe development. The opposition to this, a ‘‘cultural,
social and historicizing’’ defense of old towns, coalesced first around the preservation of significant
142 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

buildings and later moved to the issue of contextualism. The shift was motivated by the treatment of
older buildings, especially when their context was fundamentally altered. Significant buildings
would be ‘‘disencumbered,’’ isolated, and stripped clean of surrounding historical urban fabric.22
Camillo Sitte was one of the most widely read and influential architects to lament the loss of his-
torical accretion. He wanted to foster an appreciation of complex, diverse urban forms as opposed to
the geometric regularizing being advocated in large European cities and their extensions. He pro-
moted the ‘‘the science of relationships,’’ defending ‘‘the small incident, the twisted street, the
rounded corner, the little planted oasis unexpectedly come upon.’’23 John Ruskin and William Mor-
ris were particularly influential on Camillo Sitte because of their interest in the medieval city’s dense
urban fabric and the way that cities developed slowly over time, through many individual, human-
scaled adjustments. The connection to DIY urbanism today is not about the aesthetic concerns of
Ruskin, Morris, and Sitte, but rather the appreciation of small interventions and the desire to work
outside of totalizing master plans.
The large-scale master planning of the nineteenth century that Sitte was reacting against gave
way to twentieth-century modernist urbanism under the Congrès internationaux d’architecture mod-
erne. Writers like William Whyte and Jane Jacobs took up the cause against large-scale intervention.
They suggested tactics of ‘‘emphasis and suggestion’’ that deliberate urban change should focus on
helping people make order out of the chaos around them in subtle ways. Small changes that accom-
plish this would include the provision of visual interruptions in long city streets, something Camillo
Sitte was especially supportive of. Tactics for illuminating an underlying order, for promoting a
more vital and intense city, could, Jacobs argued, be relatively small. She wrote, ‘‘emphasis on bits
and pieces is of the essence: this is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and
support each other.’’24 There is, to some extent, a conceptual linkage to previous reformers: Charles
Mulford Robinson through well-placed art objects and Jane Addams through well-placed civic func-
tions. All relied on small-scale incremental change to accomplish their objectives.
A somewhat different turn on the theme of small-scale engagement was undertaken several decades
later under the label Everyday Urbanism.25 In common with Jacobs was an appreciation of individual
effort outside the bounds of institutionalized planning practice and a disdain for top-down master plan-
ning. But unlike Jacobs, Everyday Urbanism had no normative position. While also focused on the
bottom-up, nongovernmental approach, it was a movement that distanced itself from any pretense
of objectivity in the determination of standards of beauty. Everyday urbanism reflects on the urban
vernacular, where vendors, improvisation, bricolage, and the use of commonplace objects like ‘‘doggie
drinking fountains’’ make everyday urban worlds something to celebrate. The role of the urban advo-
cate is to accommodate the ‘‘endless process of adjustment’’ in the urban realm, finding ways to ‘‘man-
euver’’ within an open-ended, indeterminate approach to city improvement.26
While very different in terms of ideology, contemporary efforts like Everyday Urbanism share
the incremental orientation of earlier DIY urbanists. Camillo Sitte, Charles Robinson, Jane Addams,
and Jane Jacobs all found inspiration in the diversity, multiplicity and contrasts of urbanism. They all
sought the conservation of valued places—places that could easily be forgotten or bulldozed in the
modernist rush to accommodate large-scale, regularized, capital-intensive projects promoted by
government-backed urban planning.

Connecting Past and Present

These efforts, whether motivated by beauty, redemption, conservation, or complexity, can be viewed
together as interrelated attempts to improve cities in small-scale ways, from the bottom-up, and without
the direct involvement of government. The overall trajectory was in two broad phases. The first phase
focused on small-scale urban beautification and civic improvement, motivated in part by a desire for
social change through physical neighborhood improvement. A second phase involved recognition of the
Talen 143

need to foster urban complexity and diversity explicitly, via small-scale interventions that contrasted
with top-down, large-scale, orthogonal planning. In either phase, from beautification to Everyday
Urbanism, urban improvement existed outside the purview of government-sanctioned planning agen-
das. As such, the lineage presents some interesting contrasts and recurring debates about the role of plan-
ners and government, the possibilities of consensus, and the limits of DIY urbanism.
It must be recognized that early civic improvers and current DIY urbanists were confronting very
different urban conditions. Beautifiers and redeemers tended to ignore peripheral urban develop-
ment, largely because they did not have to contend with sprawl and its effects. This not only meant
that they had little conception of the destructive effects that decentralized planning was capable of,
but it also tended to make their efforts less about the need to focus attention on the urban core and
more about basic neighborhood functionality and the use of small-scale improvement to attend to
social needs. By the mid-twentieth century, the contrasting realities of urban core disinvestment and
suburban sprawl could not be ignored, such that contemporary DIY urbanists have to work more
explicitly to build an appreciation for urbanism itself.
This does not mean that early civic improvers did not respect and appreciate the city on its own
terms. Jane Jacobs is often credited with postulating a credible justification for cities, but turn of the
century improvers were often similarly committed. The respect for urbanism showed through in the
attention to every urban detail: street paving and cleaning, the positioning of street trees, the function
and placing of sculpture, and the need for color. These activities can be contrasted with the conven-
tional planning agenda that was emerging at the time. Small-scale improvement efforts were not
especially admired by regional planners, modernists, and garden city advocates; in fact they might
have been seen as irrelevant or even counterproductive.
Those advocating for incremental, bottom-up change—from nineteenth-century civic engagement
to twenty-first-century DIY urbanism—have varied in their openness to normative thinking and their
views about the appropriate parameters of intervention. Earlier efforts by beautifiers and social redee-
mers are critiqued for having approached their task with a fervor that was too much about the
‘‘conviction of their own rightness.’’27 The optimism inherent in the provision of neighborhood
facilities—even where limited, as they often were, to small-scale operations—has been interpreted
as being largely about social and moral coercion.28 The evolution from civic improvement to Everyday
Urbanism essentially involves omitting the more normative structure that earlier urbanists would have
found necessary. Urban beautifiers of the late nineteenth century relied on a shared understanding
about what an improved urban realm would be, where minimal effort was needed to ascertain what
the public’s interest in matters of aesthetics was. It was an eclectic sense of beauty, but one that
stressed indigenous preference and a common vernacular.29 DIY urbanists now might question whose
idea of beauty was supposed to be implemented. Robinson, writing in 1901, stated that the appearance
of municipal improvements should be approved by ‘‘an artistic authority.’’30 Now, DIY urbanists
might wonder who the ‘‘authority’’ is, and how such an authority should be selected.
While these earlier strains shared an appreciation of vernacular art and space that is now a strong
part of everyday and contemporary DIY urbanism, earlier improvers would have been less likely to
interpret any vernacular space as potentially artistic. This tension—about what constitutes a valued,
bottom-up interpretation of urbanism and how interventions should go about supporting it—surfaced
in Lewis Mumford’s critique of Jane Jacobs. He pointed out with sarcasm that Jacobs, in her require-
ment for only a ‘‘haphazard mixture’’ of urban activities, was apparently never hurt by ‘‘ugliness,
sordor, confusion.’’ He called her defense of urban diversity ‘‘esthetic philistinism with a ven-
geance.’’ Further, he argued that the antiplanning of Jacobs did not lead to a healthy ‘‘organized
complexity’’ of urban life, but instead undermined it. It amounted to ‘‘aimless dynamism,’’ an
approach that results in confusion about the essence of life and that writes off ‘‘the accompanying
increase in nervous tensions, violence, crime, and health-depleting sedatives, tranquillizers, and
atmospheric conditions.’’ Proponents of Everyday Urbanism have been similarly critiqued.31
144 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

Whether definitions of beautification and urban improvement can be agreed upon in a normative
sense, all efforts that are a part of the DIY lineage have in common that they exist outside the realm
of city government. Included in the efforts of the beautifiers and social redeemers were thousands of
individual actions that gradually, it was hoped, would translate into an improved urbanism. The
incremental, collective city building process that Jacobs and others spoke of was similarly dispersed,
residing not in plans but in the multiple actions of a wide range of urban participants, from street
vendors to neighborhood groups.
Also connecting past and current efforts was the idea that the act of ‘‘doing’’ itself has benefits. A
focus on civic responsibility and citizen involvement flourished during the progressive era, where
small-scale projects were intended to generate civic enthusiasm. As Peterson observed, ‘‘A comely
park, a clean street, a dignified city hall: these and dozens of other practical goals kept local orga-
nizations active and larger dreams alive.’’32 Hands-on building, planting, and physically improving
were beneficial not only because these tasks could directly involve many people, but because they
could bring diverse groups together, united in a common, active purpose. Writing in 1895, a village
improvement leader wrote about the group’s ability to act as ‘‘solvent’’ for the ‘‘animosities of pol-
itics and religion’’ through its insistence on collective participation.
Civic improvement was believed to have an impact on class integration as well: ‘‘A society enga-
ging all classes instead of one or two is bound to be more immediately successful than one that
includes only one class or ‘set’.’’33 The focus on integration involved multiple dimensions: social
redeemers wanted to integrate the poor within middle- and upper-class society, civic improvers
wanted to integrate civic amenities in everyday life, and later urbanists saw urbanism as the science
of relationships and interconnections. In each case, integration rested on a strategy of ‘‘many
changes by many hands.’’ However, where these changes revolved around preservation of the cul-
tural artifacts of white, affluent society, the race and class biases implicit in some civic improvement
efforts did little to improve social integration.34
Early civic improvers and later DIY urbanists have also shown common interest in using small-
scale improvement to increase urban legibility. This has involved an appreciation of the fine-
grained, unique qualities of individual places, leading to an elevation of the experiential qualities of
urbanism in the tradition of Camillo Sitte, Gordon Cullen, and later, William Whyte. It entailed a prac-
tical empiricism or the notion that the improvement of the city should be understood in terms of pre-
cedent, of observing what works and understanding what doesn’t. Reformers tend to place great
importance on having street-level, firsthand knowledge of urban places. For Jacobs, knowledge was
accumulated through regular walking in the streets of New York City in much the same way that Jane
Addams gained an understanding of the needs of immigrants in inner-city Chicago through detailed
mapping of streets and back alleys. Past and current reformers seem to share in common a recognition
that it is the lack of direct experience with urbanism that can lead to failed interventions.
A key issue confronting past civic improvement and present DIY urbanism is the degree to which
small-scale, bottom-up change should be supported by some larger government-run planning effort.
The outcomes (small-scale improvement) at both ends of the historical spectrum are similar, but the
objectives are different: one leveraging small-scale change to build toward a larger, government-
backed approach to urban improvement and one using small-scale change as a way of working
around an entrenched system that failed. Small-scale improvement that earlier proponents hoped
would lead to institutionalized planning or would someday be organized into a general plan has now
become a work-around system of engagement, designed to eclipse planning programs rather than
wait for them to take on needed improvement. And yet both approaches are motivated by necessity:
one because government-backed municipal improvement did not exist and one because government-
backed planning—now institutionalized—did not deliver. The streams are connected by their
emphasis on human scale and a desire to hone in on what matters for the every day, human-
centered experience of urban living.
Talen 145

An essential question for contemporary DIY urbanism is whether officially sanctioned support ulti-
mately limits the effectiveness of DIY urbanism. Unlike earlier small-scale civic improvement efforts,
the ability of DIY urbanists to effectuate change outside of a conventional planning bureaucracy is con-
sidered one of its key attractions. Absent an organizing framework imposed by planners, Jacobs expressed
‘‘great wonder’’ at the intricate order that cities exhibited because of the countless freedoms available to
urban dwellers—including freedom to initiate their own ideas about urban improvement. In a similar
vein, Richard Sennett in The Uses of Disorder reasoned that, absent land use laws, residents would not
rely on government or planning to solve problems, but would take it upon themselves to effect change.35
Another consideration is that, where improvement efforts at the neighborhood-level evolved into institu-
tionalized planning, problems of race and class bias and segregation seemed an inevitable outcome.36
Yet DIY urbanism is also open to the critique that it constitutes a failure of local government to do
its job, thereby offering political cover. In this sense, past and current efforts are linked. Jane
Addams thought that the city should be obligated to provide civic spaces and to believe otherwise,
she wrote, assumes ‘‘that the city itself has no obligation in the matter, an assumption upon which the
modern city turns over to commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation.’’ In the
early twentieth century, the absence of government planning meant that women’s groups were relied
upon to provide navigational cues that could help newcomers cope with the urban disorder they con-
fronted. This ad hoc approach was not always optimal. As Mumford characterized it, ‘‘the hit-and-
miss distribution of the present city’’ was not effective.37
Paradoxically, as city planning took over what individuals and civic groups had throughout the
early twentieth century undertaken themselves, faith in planning’s ability to create better urban
places declined. By mid-century, Jane Jacobs proclaimed that city streets, not government-
sanctioned playgrounds, were the best play places for children, because unlike planned spaces, they
were ‘‘teaming with life and adventure.’’ The view that state-sanctioned urban improvement was to
be distrusted became a regular theme in planning discourse. Some argued, for example, that the
‘‘planning mentality’’ was a quest for ruralized social order imposed on the assumed unnaturalness
of urban disharmony. Improvements under any guise might be based on a perception that they essen-
tially involved ‘‘fear of the urban crowd and a belief that the city was an unnatural abode for human-
ity.’’38 In contrast, the lure of DIY urbanism has been its skepticism of state-controlled
improvement, preferring instead an approach that fosters smaller, resident-generated action.
Yet, it is not always easy to differentiate DIY urbanism as planned versus unplanned, as con-
trolled versus spontaneous, or even as bottom-up versus top-down. A small-scale intervention, even
if initiated by a small group, might be viewed as a product of order and control, while another might
be viewed as impromptu and more responsive. As Spiro Kostof pointed out, this kind of duality has
to be strongly qualified. Even the most seemingly random urban occurrence—an unplanned path-
way, for example—can be ‘‘planned’’ by way of established conventions and social contracts, result-
ing from ‘‘a string of compromises between individual rights and the common will.’’39
There are other ambiguities making the assessment of contemporary DIY urbanism—and its link-
age to past improvement efforts—complex. Is the distancing from conventional planning methods a
deliberate attempt to shield small-scale urban efforts from the taint of neoliberal authority or is the
exclusion simply a reality of budget cuts? Would foresight and control enhance the bottom-up
efforts of DIY urbanism by helping it coalesce and potentially synergize a hodgepodge of unorga-
nized civic improvement efforts? Or, would involvement with traditional planning serve to under-
mine the popularity and legitimacy of DIY urbanism?

Conclusion
Today’s DIY urbanism can be interpreted as a revival of a civic spirit that was the hallmark of an
earlier era. Small-scale efforts in the nineteenth century were at first autonomous, but were later
146 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

absorbed into governmental and institutional domains, leading to larger and more comprehensive
visions of urban improvement. Under the City Beautiful and then City Efficient eras, the interest
in beauty, which had been the common denominator of municipal art and civic improvement, moved
beyond the more modest spirit of incremental change involving multiple actors that had character-
ized the earlier reform efforts. Eventually, virtually all of these early efforts were involved in one
way or another with the professionalization of city planning.
There was a transformation then from the ‘‘activated urbanity’’ of hundreds of small groups to the
contrived urbanity of architects and planners, with significantly different implications. To an emer-
ging class of urban professionals, small-scale changes to the everyday world of urban residents were
seen as insufficient, with meaningful reforms largely incapable of being accomplished via small
improvement groups. The work of the social redeemers, too, began to fade when municipal govern-
ment started to assume responsibility for many of the functions they provided. Kindergartens, com-
munity centers, parks, and playgrounds were all facilities whose locationally strategic provision
defined civic engagement early on, only to be absorbed by municipal planning by the 1920s. A fem-
inist view of this would be that male authority came to dominate the women-led efforts, and the
activities of the smaller groups were delegitimized and pushed backstage.40
For a variety of reasons, including a recession that has scaled back private redevelopment and slo-
wed public investment in neighborhood revitalization, a renewed approach that again operates outside
the bounds of conventional planning is gaining traction. Now, instead of relying on an official planning
effort, DIY urbanism celebrates and attempts to sustain an urban vibrancy that connects back to the
earliest urban improvement impulses. This is not to deny that the ideas of early civic improvers and
later DIY urbanists grew out of different economic realities, involving different perspectives about aes-
thetics and order. It is only to draw attention to the cyclical nature of American grassroots activism,
which can again be relied upon to initiate improvement when official channels fall short.
The historical experience with DIY urbanism raises two key questions. The first is whether
bureaucratized planning control will ultimately thwart the very vibrancy and bottom-up spirit that
DIY urbanism is intended to inject. Second, and interrelated to the first, is whether incremental,
small-scale change is effective on its own, as an ad hoc set of interventions that don’t necessarily
produce a sum greater than their parts. Even Jacobs and Alexander believed that urban change
should not be made in isolation, but must be cognizant of how it interlocks with other patterns and
activities. Christopher Alexander’s ‘‘pattern language’’ is formulated as a network, to be used as a
structured language that allows individual freedom to emerge.41 It emphasizes that organic whole-
ness cannot be implemented in one master-planned project and must be developed sequentially—but
neither is a random scattering of urban change necessarily worth the effort.
Even where small-scale interventions can be strategically located for a wider effect, an approach
optimistically described as ‘‘urban acupuncture,’’42 it often seems as though current DIY urbanism is
missing this attention to integration. Lewis Mumford’s summation could have been stated by earlier
beautifiers or redeemers: ‘‘the spotting and inter-relationship of schools, libraries, theaters, and com-
munity centers is the first task in defining the urban neighborhood and laying down the outlines of an
integrated city.’’43 DIY Urbanism is smaller than schools and libraries, but might the idea of spatial
attentiveness also be applied to the next level down of urban investment—food carts, parking lot
parks, and swimming pool dumpsters? Lewis Mumford decried the mechanical order of modernist
approaches to city building, but he did want individual effort to add up to something. The value of
urban complexity—appreciated by Mumford as ‘‘social theater,’’ by Jacobs as ‘‘street ballet,’’ and
by Whyte as the ‘‘urban stage’’—required an organizing framework to be realized.
Given the profound social and economic change, where damage caused by disinvestment has been
extreme, DIY urbanism and its attention to pocket parks, doggie fountains, and sidewalk seating may
seem now to have a negligible effect. As Mimi Zeiger wrote in her review of tactical urbanism, ‘‘sys-
temic or political inner-city fixes, these are not.’’44 And yet, in the recognition of neighborhood
Talen 147

collective spirit, of the importance of bottom-up activism, and of the sheer power of place, past and
current DIY urbanism are linked in a shared sense of optimism that small can be beautiful.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Jonathan Lerner, ‘‘Street Makeovers Put New Spin on the Block,’’ Miller-McCune, January 16, 2012, 1;
Ruth Keffer, DIY Urbanism Exhibit: Testing the Grounds of Social Change (San Francisco, CA: SPUR,
September 7, 2010 through January 2011); Jeffrey Hou, Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and
the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, 1st ed. (London, UK: Routledge, 2010).
2. Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit A La Ville I (1968 edition) (Paris, France: Editions Anthropos, 1968); David Har-
vey, ‘‘The Right to the City,’’ New Left Review 53, no. 2 (October 2008): 23–40; Mimi Zeiger, The Inter-
ventionist’s Toolkit, Part 1. Places, January 1, 2011, accessed April 1, 2013, http://places.designobserver.
com/feature/the-interventionists-toolkit-part-1/24308/.
3. Although this does not mean that such uses are state-sanctioned, see Annette M. Kim, ‘‘The Mixed-use
Sidewalk,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 78, no. 3 (2012): 225–38, doi:10.1080/
01944363.2012.715504.
4. M. Kimmelman, ‘‘Projects without Architects Steal the Show,’’ New York Times, September 12, 2012, C1.
5. Donovan Finn, ‘‘Growing Greener in the City: Open Space Advocacy for Environmental Justice in Jackson
Heights,’’ Progressive Planning no. 187 (Spring 2011): 12–17.
6. A. Arieff, ‘‘It’s time to Rethink ‘Temporary’,’’ The New York Times Opinionator, December 19, 2011,
accessed January 19, 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/its-time-to-rethink-temporary/.
7. Mimi Zeiger, The Interventionist’s Toolkit, Part 3: Our Cities, Ourselves. Places, September 12, 2011,
accessed April 1, 2013, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/the-interventionists-toolkit-part-3/29908/.
8. Kelly Rodgers and Kelley Roy, Cartopia: Portland’s Food Cart Revolution (Portland, OR: Roy Rodgers
Press, 2010).
9. Lerner, ‘‘Street Makeovers Put New Spin on the Block,’’ Miller-McCune, 2012; Mike Lydon et al., Tactical
Urbanism, accessed March 15, 2013, http://www.scribd.com/doc/51354266/Tactical-Urbanism-Volume-1,
2011; Zeiger, The Interventionist’s Toolkit, Part 3, 2011; Kimmelman, ‘‘Projects Without Architects Steal
the Show,’’ 2012; Arieff, ‘‘It’s Time to Rethink ‘Temporary’,’’ 2011.
10. Karl Linn, Building Commons and Community (New York: New Village Press, 2007); John Chase,
Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008).
11. Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and
the Model Town of Pullman, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 8.
12. Ibid., 5.
13. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America. A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
14. Jon A. Peterson, ‘‘The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings,’’ Journal of Urban
History 2 (August 1976):415–34.
15. Ibid., 44–45.
16. Frederick S. Lamb, ‘‘Municipal Art,’’ Municipal Affairs 1 (1897): 674–76, 678–79, 682–86, 688, 683.
17. Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art: Or The City Made Beautiful (1903) (Whitefish, MT:
Kessinger, 2008).
148 Journal of Planning History 14(2)

18. Peterson, ‘‘The City Beautiful Movement,’’ 48, note 30.

19. Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
20. Donald L. Miller, ‘‘The New City/Planned Order and Messy Vitality,’’ A Biography of America, WGBH
Educational Foundation, 2000; Spain, How Women Saved the City, 60.
21. Spain, How Women Saved the City, 2002.
22. Spiro Kostof, ‘‘The Design of Cities,’’ Places 5, no. 4 (1993): 85–88.
23. Kostof, ‘‘The Design of Cities,’’ 84.
24. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 377.
25. Chase, Crawford, and Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism, 2008.
26. Ruth Durack, ‘‘Village Vices: The Contradiction of New Urbanism and Sustainability,’’ Places 14, no. 2
(2001): 64–69.
27. William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Creating the North American Landscape) (Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 41.
28. Peter Geoffrey Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the
Twentieth Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).
29. John Brinckeroff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
30. Charles Mulford Robinson, The Improvement of Towns and Cities or the Practical Basis of Civic Aesthetics
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 35.
31. Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 113, 197; for
critiques of Everyday Urbanism, see for example, Douglas Kelbaugh, ‘‘Three Paradigms: New Urbanism,
Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism—An Excerpt from the Essential Common Place,’’ Bulletin of Science,
Technology & Society 20, no. 4 (August 1, 2000): 285–89. doi:10.1177/027046760002000406.
32. Peterson, ‘‘The City Beautiful Movement,’’ 54.
33. Birdsey G. Northrup, ‘‘The Work of Village Improvement Societies,’’ Forum 19 (March 1895): 95–105, 104.
34. Christopher Silver, ‘‘Revitalizing the Urban South,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 57, no.
1 (1991): 69.
35. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961, 391; Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder:
Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).
36. Howard Gillette, ‘‘The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning from the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing
Act,’’ Journal of Urban History 9, no. 4 (August 1, 1983): 421–44. doi:10.1177/009614428300900402.
37. Mumford, The Urban Prospect, 197.
38. M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1983), 9.
39. Kostof, ‘‘The Design of Cities,’’ 85.
40. Spain, How Women Saved the City, 2002.
41. C. Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King, and S. Angel, A Pattern Lan-
guage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
42. Nan Ellin, Integral Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2006).
43. Mumford, The Urban Prospect, 1937.
44. Zeiger, The Interventionist’s Toolkit, Part 3, 2011.

Author Biography
Emily Talen, Fellow of American Institute of Certified Planners, etalen@asu.edu, is a professor in the School
of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.
Her research focuses on sustainable urbanism, social diversity, urban design, and the history of codes.