Journal of Urbanism: International Research on

Placemaking and Urban Sustainability

ISSN: 1754-9175 (Print) 1754-9183 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjou20

Claiming participation – a comparative analysis of

DIY urbanism in Denmark

Louise Fabian & Kristine Samson

To cite this article: Louise Fabian & Kristine Samson (2016) Claiming participation – a
comparative analysis of DIY urbanism in Denmark, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on
Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 9:2, 166-184, DOI: 10.1080/17549175.2015.1056207

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2015.1056207

Published online: 28 Jul 2015.

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Journal of Urbanism, 2016
Vol. 9, No. 2, 166–184, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2015.1056207

Claiming participation – a comparative analysis of DIY urbanism in

Denmark
Louise Fabiana* and Kristine Samsonb
a
Department of Culture and Society, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark; bDepartment of
Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

The article discuss the conflicts, potentials and possible alliances of do-it-yourself
(DIY) urbanism when it takes the form of spontaneous place appropriations, when it is
performed as participatory urban design and when it is integrated strategically in plan-
ning. DIY urbanism and experimentation with participation are currently strong influen-
tial factors in Danish planning. The article explores the use of participatory DIY urban
design in two cases: the relocation of beer drinkers in Enghave Square and the Carls-
berg City development in Copenhagen, Denmark. Carlsberg City is the most thorough
Danish example of how DIY urban design is employed as an investment and planning
tool. It discusses the implications of DIY urbanism in terms of how it can be under-
stood in the context of the struggles over ‘the right to the city’, how it applies different
activist tactics for the appropriation of space, and how it is integrated in planning and
the development logic.
Keywords: do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism; place appropriations; participatory
urbanism; urban design; urban planning; activism

In urban spaces around the world, people knit sweaters for lampposts; they plant flowers
in unused urban spaces; and they paint their own bicycle lanes where they find them lack-
ing. These activities and their potential contributions to urban space have been an impor-
tant field of research in recent years. We see a strong and growing interest, both practical
and theoretical, in how bottom-up initiated, micro-spatial urban practices are contributing
towards reshaping and reinterpreting urban spaces (Burnham 2010; Gauntlett 2011; Haydn
and Temel 2006; Iveson 2013; Zeiger 2011). Terms such as “do-it-yourself (DIY)
urbanism” (Iveson 2013; Zeiger 2011), “tactical urbanism” 1 (Lydon and Garcia 2011),
“guerrilla urbanism” (Hou 2010), “participatory urbanism” (Wortham-Galwin 2013), and
“everyday urbanism” (Chase, Crawford, and Kaliski 2008) all try to capture and describe
the contemporary growth in various forms of creative, localized attributions and alterations
of urban environments.
This article seeks to contribute to the extant research concerning how DIY urbanism
might strengthen citizens” possibility of participation in and production of space by focus-
ing on the alliances as well as the fields of tension and conflict between DIY activism and
DIY urban design. It discusses the conflicts, potentials and possible alliances of DIY
urbanism both when it takes the form of anonymous tactical place appropriations and
when it is integrated strategically in urban planning.
DIY urbanism is a strong influential factor in Danish urban design at present. But the
degree to which DIY initiatives and participatory urban design have lately been articulated

*Corresponding author. Email: idelfl@cas.au.dk

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 Journal of Urbanism 167

as catalysts of urban transformation makes it necessary to explore critically whether DIY

tactics can be integrated into strategic urban planning without seriously compromising the
engagement and political potency of the citizen as activist. At the same time, by pinpointing
and examining bottom-up DIY urban activism and participatory urban design processes, we
discuss the implications of DIY urbanism in terms of how it can be understood in the
context of the struggles over “the right to the city”; how it applies different tactics for the
appropriation of space; how it reassembles urban materiality and site-specific qualities; as
well as the consequences of integrating it in planning processes and development.
As this article seeks to show, some of its defining characteristics, and especially its
potential for political empowerment, is threatened when DIY urbanism is strategically
instrumentalized in a development context. We discuss the implications of recent examples
of Danish DIY urban design, that attempt to mediate between the bottom-up initiatives in
DIY urbanism and strategic and communicative planning as a development tool. These often
leave you feeding on the coolness factor (and gentrification potential) of DIY urbanism, but
missing the critical and empowering potentials the tactics originally had in the activist con-
texts when originally developed. By contextualizing DIY urbanism in relation to historical
changes in ideals of participation and activism, we highlight how the democratic ideals of
participation and the political prowess of activism are often diluted (Figure 1).
The method of study in this article is interdisciplinary. We combine socio-historical
contextualizations and critical geographical analysis of spatial politics and place appropria-
tions with empirical case studies consisting of ethnographic observations, photographs,
and interviews with participants, developers, architects and various users. The main cases
are two Danish instances of urban design, working with two very different forms of
participation: Carlsberg City and the relocation of beer drinkers at Enghave Square, both
in Copenhagen. We also draw on empirical studies of several Danish and international
examples of unauthorized creative attributions or alterations of urban space.

The right to the city

DIY activism (by which we mean small-scale user-initiated, not officially sanctioned
tactics) is often aimed at improving the physical and social environment of local
communities through temporary, quick, cheap and grass roots-based activities. These prac-
tises have both inspired and been inspired by theories about how the production of urban
space is a contested process where a number of different stakeholders struggle over what
and who the city is for (de Certeau 1984; Iveson 2013; Lefebvre 1991).
A very important concept used as a prism for understanding the political dimension of
these practises has been the mantra “the right to the city”. This political phrase was coined
in the context of civil unrest in Paris in 1968 by Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre 1996); it has
been famously revisited by David Harvey (Harvey 2008), and again in the context of
recent urban social movements (Harvey 2012). The idea of the right to the city raises
important research questions, such as: how these micro-spatial practices might create and
reveal alternative cities within the existing city (Hou 2010; Iveson 2013); how we might
get from small-scale place appropriations to longer-term changes (Lydon and Garcia 2011)
and how DIY tactics might facilitate a more democratic participatory city.
The micro-spatial place appropriations seem to deliver a promise that another more
humane or social world is possible. As Kurt Iveson, inspired by Peter Marcuse (Marcuse
2009), has shown, DIY urbanism often points to an inherent conflict between user value
and exchange value in the city. Iveson suggests that those engaged in DIY practices can
build their politics by asserting inhabitance as the underpinning principle of their urban
168 L. Fabian and K. Samson

Figure 1. DIY design questioning the right to the city in Istanbul, November 2013. Citizens paint a
staircase in Cihangir neighbourhood as a protest against the grey colours of Taksim Square and the
lack of democracy and participation in the planning processes of the Istanbul City administration.
Source: Kristine Samson.

authority and potential power (Iveson 2013, 945). According to this Lefebvre-inspired
logic, the right to use and shape the city is based on the activist’s inhabitance of the city.
Furthermore, Iveson argues that DIY appropriations have the possibility of generating a
political impact when they manage to stage a confrontation between the right to the city
based on inhabitance, on the one hand, and the right to the city based on some other
undemocratic form of authority (typically the law, money, private property, commercial
interests, the advertising industry, etc.), on the other (Iveson 2013).
In order to understand the tensions between the strategic and tactical levels (de Certeau),
we find it relevant to point to the development of the ideal of participation, from when it
was first brought to the fore in the planning practised in the 1960s – with a strong demand
for more inclusive, decentralized and legitimate forms of power – until today, where these
ideals are often compromised in “shopping list” consultation that utilizes more individualist
and consumerist forms of participation (Kaminer and Krivy 2013; Love 2013).
 Journal of Urbanism 169

Figure 2. DIY design on the elevated highway at Minhocão in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The inflammable
bubble is both a reaction against real estate development in downtown Sao Paulo and an example
of how DIY design travels globally – from the initial design by Raumlabor to this site-specific
appropriation by Muda Coletivo in Brazil.
Source: Kristine Samson.

Unauthorized creative contributions to urban space

But what are the cultural, social, aesthetic and/or political potentials in inviting people to
have breakfast in a public venue with others they do not know (see http://publicspaceac
tion.tumblr.com)? What is the meaning of transforming a parking lot into a temporary
garden (see www.parkingday.org); or of distorting advertising messages on bus stops and
billboards? Are they urban forms of acupuncture where a seemingly very small interven-
tion can influence a much bigger organism?
These activities typically infuse neglected or afflicted neighbourhoods with new
meaning (Figure 2). It is precisely this tactical ability to reinvent, defamiliarize, enliven
and reappropriate places we survey, strategically utilized in a development context in the
Carlsberg case analysed below.
Micro-spatial DIY tactics also raise the issue of the right to the city by pointing to and
questioning habitual uses; and by initiating and revealing new uses and meanings of a
space. A famous example of this is Park(ing) Day. This is now a worldwide event: on a
globally coordinated date, metered parking spaces are once a year temporarily transformed
into public places of recreation and socializing. Park(ing) Day as a phenomenon started in
San Francisco in 2005, initiated by the art and design studio Rebar in order to question
the values that decide the form and use of public space.
Unauthorized contributions often consist of responses to what people perceive as
inadequacies in the urban environs. Activists here contribute personally to the visual and
social layering of the city by painting their own bicycle lanes, crosswalks and signage; or
by installing benches and other forms of street furniture. For example, the Portland-based
non-profit organization Depave has, since 2007, worked with people from the local
community to make places and cities greener; to promote community; and to ameliorate
the negative effects of storm water runoff by removing asphalt in locales such as school
170 L. Fabian and K. Samson

playgrounds, parking lots and residential driveways. These DIY urban repairs of the city’s
public space may indicate the need for future extensions or improvements of the urban
infrastructure.
Besides the already mentioned pop-up parks, another interesting example of DIY
attributions is pop-up street furniture. Pop-up street furniture often has a distinctly
recognizable DIY aesthetic; characterized by hand-made reuse of “whatever is available”
materials. La Chapitre Zero is, for instance, a Paris-based project where reclaimed wood is
used for urban furniture.
In a society that has equated development with the shift from man made to machine
made for hundreds of years, this trend of making things for oneself can be understood in
several ways. Making actual things for oneself can be connected to a sense of wonder,
agency and possibility in the world; and may be a way for an individual or group to make
their social imaginaries, ideas, frustrations and hopes tangible, manifest and communicable
(Gauntlett 2011).
The demand for and interest in participatory culture and planning processes are also
fuelled and mediated by new forms of sociality that are in turn enabled by innovations in
information technologies, such as the making-and-sharing ethos of Web 2.0. Digital audi-
ences have grown from a primarily interpreting role to producing, altering and distributing
media content (Schäfer 2011). On online social platforms, billboard hijackers and actors
inspired by movements such as Adbusters and Reclaim the Street often perceive and stage
themselves as culture jammers and sign pirates who, with the help of guerrilla communica-
tion, try to reclaim the public space as a communal space of differences, and strive to
establish sub-cultural oppositional niches and counter-discourses in a society dominated
by a growing commercialization and production of signs.
Unauthorized DIY design attributions share many characteristics with other forms of
socio-artistic activism such as graffiti and street art. Similarly, these forms of creative place
appropriation allow different actors to intervene in and appropriate public space in order
to inscribe themselves in them; to attach themselves to them; and to get other people to
relate and respond to them. These place interventions and place appropriations might
mobilize or intensify the social qualities of public space and promote new experiences and
perceptions of urban space. Furthermore, they question and challenge the concept of pub-
lic space by raising the issue of for whom the public space might be accessible and usable.
Thus, these temporary critical and creative activities in urban surroundings may contribute
to and mobilize the public and social dimensions of space, increase social interactions and
facilitate the negotiation of meaning (Fabian 2012).
Place appropriations such as street art, graffiti and guerrilla gardening make it possible
for citizens to discover and comment on each other’s traces in and negotiations of urban
space, thereby ascribing value and meaning to the moving and moveable geo-semiotics of
the city. Such acts often assert a reclamation of public space as occupiable and negotiable
by all – but do they unintentionally (re)produce existing or new forms of exclusion? Do
they encourage greater creativity, mobilization and dialogue among various groups and
individuals? On whose behalf do they speak?
Some of these initiatives have strong ambitions to empower the local community;
others are closely linked to global trends that spread virally. Examples are Park(ing) Day,
Pillow Fight Day and flash mobs; but also performative protest formats such as Standing
Man or, in Turkish, Duran Adam. Standing Man was initiated by performance artist Erdem
Gündüz in June 2013 as a reaction against the suppression of the Turkish media and police
violence against the Occupy Gezi movement. Simply standing without saying a word, the
silent performance quickly became a symbol for the non-violent response to the otherwise
 Journal of Urbanism 171

violent incidents in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The performance quickly spread all over
Turkey and became a collective performance where people gathered in public squares to
take a stand against violence (Figures 3a and b). Through social media and the hashtags
#Standing Man and #Duran Adam, the participatory performance was adopted a few days
later by Brazilian protesters in the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
DIY initiatives like the DIY design in downtown Sao Paulo and the various manifesta-
tions during Occupy Gezi demonstrate criticism of neoliberal commercial control of public
space and the politics wielded in the name of free markets and private property rights.
Another example of this is the project “Brandalism”, the biggest subvertising campaign in
UK history. Here, in June 2012, 25 artists from eight countries appropriated billboards in
Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol and London.
The ethos and politics of direct action, – where people proffer an alternative social
imaginary by living it – is an important aspect of the micro-spatial urban practises we are
trying to understand here. Occupation has been a widely used protest tactic by social
movements. Often, the appropriated surroundings are important symbolic parts of the city
such as financial districts, central squares and public parks. Important recent examples of
this are the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece (in 2010), the Arab Spring
(from 2011), Los Indignados and the 15-M Movement in Spain (from 2011), the Occupy
movement (from September 2011), Occupy Gezi in Istanbul in 2013, and the uprisings in
Brazil in 2013 against the World Cup of 2014. In these instances, the occupation of public
venues is a way amongst others of protesting against economic inequality, political corrup-
tion, and the sell out of common space and common goods to commercial interests. Some-
times, the hope and demand aim at bringing down authoritarian regimes, as in the Arab
Spring. At other times – as in the Occupy movement and the protests in Southern Europe
– people try to resist strict austerity measures with a common feeling of being victims of
an unfair political and economic system – with capitalism as the common enemy. These
horizontally organized new social movements often have a lack of clear infrastructure and
strong internal diversity. The spatial concentration in public squares turns “the people”
from being a phantom entity into being a visibly present social actor reclaiming common
space. Within the scope of this article, it is interesting to note how setting up tents and
creating temporary everyday living spaces, such as canteens and libraries, become per-
formative political means. The new social movements reacting to the global economic cri-
sis have also fostered a process where the place occupations have moved out into the
neighbourhoods and developed different self-managed, autonomous social spaces such as
community kitchens, housing for people being kicked out of their homes, free teaching, as
well as workplace occupations and cooperatives (Sitrin and Azzellini 2014).

DIY urban design in a planning context

The opportunistic tactics and the emergent process of the everyday are also being broadly
celebrated in a planning context (Chase, Crawford, and Kaliski 2008; Cuff and Sherman
2011; Stickells 2011). For centuries, urban planning has sought to create social order and
growth by organizing, disciplining and controlling space. For the last 40 years, however,
this top-down approach to urban planning has been increasingly questioned and criticized.
Since the 1960s, planning reforms have been influenced by a demand for citizen involve-
ment (Love 2013). These days are seeing a growing openness amongst city planners,
architects and politicians willing to contemplate and learn from everyday urbanism and
bottom-up approaches to planning.
172 L. Fabian and K. Samson

In the introduction to Fast-Forward Urbanism, Cuff and Sherman write:

At the onset of an era in which reconfiguring, revitalizing, and reimagining will increasingly
dominate metropolitan practices, an architecture that engages what we used to call the city

Figure 3. Occupy Gezi was characterized by a collective, participatory culture in which heteroge-
neous social and cultural groups came together to protest against the monoculture of the regime and
Taksim urban development. Also, the performance protest Standing Man became a symbol of partic-
ipation as the lone standing man quickly turned into a public protest by citizens all over Turkey.
Source: Licensed under Creative Commons. Photo: Tarik Basoglu.
 Journal of Urbanism 173

and the suburbs is required. […] We need new kinds of operations undertaken opportunisti-
cally that reference the existing urban work – the city as found. (Cuff and Sherman 2011, 12)

The interest in the city “as it is”, “as found” and “as it operates” has both a tactical and a
strategic origin. From the point of view of the citizen, this interest can be seen as a long-
ing for agency; a desire to be an active and politically potent part of urban life; a romantic
flirtation with the “spontaneous” life of the street – or a search for and experimentation
with new forms of sociality and senses of belonging. From an urban design point of view,
interest in the DIY city is typically an interest in how the operating systems of the existing
city and the aspirations and practices of its citizens can give sustainable life to design
interventions in the urban fabric.
Urban planners, architects, developers and public institutions are increasingly experi-
menting with DIY urbanism, small-scale improvements and temporary use, approaches they
see as potential ways to stage or try out the possibilities of longer-term investments (Haydn
and Temel 2006; Oswalt, Overmeyer, and Misselwitz 2013; Zeiger 2011). Accordingly, we
see a growing interest in understanding the logic of “the informal city” (Brillembourg,
Feireiss, and Klumpner 2005). Municipalities are permanently implementing short-term,
low-budget improvements initiated by activist citizens. Examples include guerrilla garden-
ing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; harbour front areas in both Rotterdam and Amsterdam;
and the transformation of Berlin in Germany after die Wende, for instance Mellowpark and
Tempelhof; in Denmark, the Institut for (X) in Aarhus, Urban Play in Køge and Musicon in
Roskilde; and Nedre Elvehavn in Trondheim, Norway. It is also a strategy increasingly
applied in the United States. In California, there have been numerous reports of how the
unauthorized painting of a bike lane has been adopted as an authorized permanent solution.
The US Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 also focused on temporary
architecture, crowdsourced urban planning and unauthorized urban design interventions
under the title “Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good”.

Everyday urbanism […] attacks the paradox differently, suggesting that the city does not
demand design, at least not by professionals who see themselves as dictating form from the
outside. Instead, the vitality of the city is shaped by everyday actors immune to our theories.
(Cuff and Sherman 2011, 15)

This new urban design paradigm questions the modernist paradigm in architecture and
planning regarding the designer and architect as the mastermind skilled to design for the
needs and taste of the people living in the city. Participatory planning processes are often
attributed in a new form of affective spatial production. In the immaterial and cultural
re-enactments of the industrial and Fordist city, the user and the citizen gain an important
role as tactical and opportunistic creative agents who transform the city into local, often
transitory utopias. Cultural re-enactments of industrial architecture frequently proceed
through affective aesthetics. DIY cultures tend to proceed through affective production as
aesthetical re-enactments of existing urban spaces and architecture, such as factories,
infrastructure or harbour docks. Light, sound and the artistic creation of ambient environ-
ments are dramaturgical means by which communities and artists engage with the found
materiality. The formal master plan and architectural design thus belong to the Fordist city
with its durable representational surroundings and architecture. By contrast, cultural pro-
duction proposes events rather than aesthetic, representational forms and meanings; as
events do not resemble, conform to or reproduce a set of a priori conditions.
Compared with the modernist city and with modern life in the early 20th century, the
role of the individual has changed towards a more embedded, tactical approach to urban
174 L. Fabian and K. Samson

space. The DIY cultural production of today not only challenges the spatial productions of
the architect and planner and the way urban spaces are produced around the world, but also
changes the role of the citizen and the individual’s political engagement with public space.
In the following we will compare two Danish examples of DIY design: Enghave
Minipark and Carlsberg City in Copenhagen. In different ways, the two cases illustrate
how various interests claim participation and DIY tactics. By formalizing DIY tactics, the
two cases raise doubts as to whether DIY urbanism can be integrated into strategic urban
planning without seriously compromising the engagement and the political potency of the
citizen’s right to the city.

Relocating the beer drinkers: Enghave Minipark

The idea for Enghave Minipark was born when artist and curator Kenneth Balfelt identified
an upcoming conflict in Enghave Square in Vesterbro, a former working-class neighbourhood
in Copenhagen. As part of a planned development of the underground system, Enghave
Square was facing renewal, with a new underground station as its most conspicuous feature.
A group of beer-drinking locals had for a long time been using the square. Balfelt identified
these people as “super users” of the public space, since they used the square every day as an
inclusive meeting place.
Balfelt went on to negotiate and discuss taste, value and possible aesthetics onsite
with the users. His method was simple: he showed up on the square with a computer,
asking the beer drinkers what sort of design they would like, while at the same time
discussing the various examples of urban design in terms of functionality, symbolic value
and everyday aesthetics. In other words, spatial qualities was debated and discussed in situ
(Figure 4).

Figure 4. End users and the artist discuss urban design solutions for Enghave Minipark in Vesterbro,
Copenhagen.
Source: Simon Mertner Wind, © Kenneth Balfelt.
 Journal of Urbanism 175

After the initial onsite workshop, Balfelt proceeded to negotiate with the local authori-
ties. Ordinarily in an urban development project in Denmark it is standard procedure for
the municipality to arrange a public hearing about what is being planned. Public hearings,
at least on paper, give people a forum to speak up against changes. Since Balfelt proposed
the project to the municipality before the professional planners had even thought about
involving users, the process in this case was initiated from below. Balfelt asked the local
council of Vesterbro for financial support for a public renewal, while at the same time ask-
ing Spektrum Architects to help formalize the beer drinkers’ ideas. Their ideas were
indeed adopted; their gathering point was relocated 150 metres away, close to some
skateboard ramps. They did not utilize existing urban furniture and design, as Balfelt had
initially suggested, but did adopt a DIY design based on the ideas of one of the beer
drinkers, Michael, also known as “The Bornholmer”.
Today, the new Enghave Minipark is a reality and has a number of daily users. Balfelt
considers the project a collaborative work of art; accordingly, he arranged to exhibit docu-
mentation of the entire process afterwards at Nikolaj, a Copenhagen church turned art gal-
lery. However, the beer drinkers regard the park as being of their own design (Figure 5).
Summing up, the relocation of beer drinkers can be seen as an example of participatory
DIY design. Here, artistic expression and design are co-created by diverse stakeholders:
artists, workers, locals, planners. On the one hand, the existing socio-cultural city was
transformed during the process as new relationships were established and new social ties
arose among the people involved. On the other hand, the urban fabric was redesigned by
its end users, since the collective process let them establish their own park in accordance
with their personal taste, needs and daily use. Finally, the roles of the participants were
fluid and cooperative, because the artist was actually able to cooperate on an equal footing
with the beer drinkers. And the architect did not propose the architectural design alone,
but helped the beer drinkers to formalize their ideas in aesthetic form. What could have
been a potential conflict in the eyes of professional urban planners – people drinking beer

Figure 5. DIY design in Enghave Minipark consists of a collective bench, a shelter and cobble-
stone pavement designed by users to suit their specific needs and taste.
Source: Kenneth Balfelt; reproduced by permission.
176 L. Fabian and K. Samson

in front of a new underground station and refusing to move – became instead a collective
art project; an instance of urban design appreciated by its ordinary users; as well as an
example of participatory DIY design.
Such an example can be understood within a framework that differs radically from
modernist and postmodernist urban design. In this case, DIY urban design has been engen-
dered at a specific site through the direct involvement of its end users – users who engage
in, perform and design the future contours of the locality. Enghave Minipark also repre-
sents a radical departure from the understanding of urban design as an object or as durable
architecture. Rather, it is design as an act happening in situ. As a participatory initiative, it
relied on engagement and human relations involving many stakeholders: users, architect,
planner and artist. Whereas urban design in modernist and postmodern planning and archi-
tecture has relied on a master plan and top-down initiatives from private developers or the
state, Enghave Minipark clearly illustrates a collective, proactive approach to the trans-
formation of urban spaces. It is an example of fluid and emergent planning in which the
roles of the participants take shape during the process. In Jean Hillier’s words, the power
at stake in such planning processes “is not fixed but emergent, complex, diffuse and
mobile, sometimes unpredictable” (Hillier 2007, 24). In the relocation of the beer drinkers,
the design process was not only informal but also actually unstable: nobody knew what
would come out of it. Whereas the process was successful as an example of co-creation
and rights to the urban involvement of the citizens, the long-term result was, and remains,
unpredictable.
DIY design projects such as Balfelt’s relocation of the beer drinkers can therefore be
understood in terms of a participatory process in which the urban vernacular and daily use
take over and “everyday life performs the city producing new spatial forms” (Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett 2005, 19).
In the case of the beer drinkers, this was precisely what occurred. Not only did all the
negotiations around the beer drinkers’ future site take place in the public space, at the very
square that was being debated, but also the beer drinkers developed their own symbolic
expression. For instance, the cobblestones in the Minipark pavement formed tribal art pat-
terns that departed from the pavement patterns of ordinary public design. The symbolic
expression of the beer drinkers was thus a manifestation of their taste and design prefer-
ences, and also a way for them to create a meaningful everyday life and identity by means
of urban design. In that way, the resulting design became a documentation and inscription
of everyday practices and use in the city.

Carlsberg City: urban play as an investment tool

If we look at Carlsberg City – the most comprehensive Danish example of how DIY urban
design is employed as an investment tool – the question arises as to whether and how the
tactical approach to DIY urbanism can communicate with the strategic level of much urban
planning; and whether everyday urbanism will be adopted and ultimately destroyed by the
financial interests of strategic urban planning. Strategic developers and professional plan-
ners are increasingly aware of the potentials in DIY initiatives. They know that perceptions
and interactions in public space inspire and give shape to desire; including the desire to
invest in, inhabit, take ownership of and territorialize the as yet unknown, the informal.
Strategy represents neither a neutral tool nor a mere technique. As Kornberger and
Clegg have noted: “strategy, in practice, constructs that which is its object through means
of accounting for, normalising and representing phenomena as objects of strategy”
(Kornberger and Clegg 2011, 3). The way in which strategy normalizes and represents
 Journal of Urbanism 177

phenomena as objects of strategy can be seen in the way strategic urban planning normal-
izes and absorbs urban tactics, participation, play and DIY cultures. The Carlsberg
development in Copenhagen is an obvious example of how developers seek to attract new
users and future investment by means of playgrounds, urban gaming, subcultures, DIY
music events and street culture. They normalize playfulness; incorporate creativity and
customize the informal. When visiting Carlsberg City in 2008–12, we observed how many
of the temporary initiatives are being utilized and co-created by the citizens. The initiatives
included design competitions with democratic urban furniture created by young designers;
open industrial spaces used for street gaming and play; and the temporary installations in
the so-called “New Tap Square” used by young people as a venue for music events and
parties (Figures 6 and 7).
While these examples represent seemingly everyday cultural utilizations, they are at
the same time excellent illustrations of how the strategic planners of the former Carlsberg
brewery site normalize and represent DIY phenomena as strategic objects. In this manner,
urban spatial planning works strategically with affects and aesthetics (Anderson and
Harrison 2010; Thrift 2004, 2008), but aims for effects. By means of participatory designs
in which citizens seemingly co-create their surroundings by fostering festivals, partaking
in sports and engaging playfully in the urban environment at Carlsberg, citizens also par-
ticipate in the aestheticization of the city’s future through cultural and spatial contributions.
As Vivant (2009) suggests, the built environment is becoming a playground for cultural
policy-makers as it opens up for new collaborations between cultural initiatives and plan-
ning. However, cultural and collaborative projects not only serve playful and cultural pur-
poses, they also contribute to place marketing. As a lived and spatial supplement to the
three-dimensional renderings of the architects, DIY culture and play partake in the visual
and spatial place-making. DIY cultures and the playful engagement of users promise a
lively urban environment in the Carlsberg City yet to come. But will the same young
creative people gather in the area when new high-rent condos are built? Will the new

Figure 6. The Wood of Ropes is an interactive playground and temporary culture venue at the
Carlsberg City.
Source: Kristine Samson.
178 L. Fabian and K. Samson

Figure 7. Bubble Square: a temporary playground for urban sports at Carlsberg City.
Source: Kristine Samson.
inhabitants welcome noise from cultural events? And what about all the skaters and people
engaging in urban sports – will they be welcomed by future high-income families living in
apartments designed by star architects?
The Carlsberg developers do not hide the fact that the temporary designs and cultural
events are indeed temporary. The short-term DIY spaces have been strategically incorpo-
rated as a way of place-making and partaking in the mental transformation of the area.
And the area will be formally developed by architects. In 2008, before the temporary and
collective design initiatives were established, Entasis Architects won the architecture com-
petition for the development with a highly aestheticized master plan (Figures 8a and b).
As the Carlsberg City case illustrates, even though bottom-up initiatives, DIY cultures
and participatory design may be amply represented in urban design today, they most often
function as strategic communication and planning – in this case, as the avant-gardist gen-
trifiers performing and realizing the image of a ludic, human, pedestrian-friendly city.

From DIY urban design to strategic planning and communication

Even when participatory planning processes are initially motivated by democratic and
egalitarian ambitions and policies of inclusion, these goals can sometimes end up being
compromised by the effectual inequalities of the actors involved, either as stagers of the
process or as invited participants.
In Copenhagen’s Carlsberg City, developers work strategically with temporary spaces,
playgrounds and cultural activities as part of the area’s strategic planning. Similarly, the
municipality of the Danish town Køge uses street art exhibitions implemented in the afore-
mentioned old industrial harbour as a “gentrifier”, with the aim of appealing to the creative
class (Fabian and Samson 2014). In these two cases, attracting the attention of the creative
class through participation, play and DIY initiatives has involved temporary urban art; the
engagement of users through experiences; and a general staging of authenticity of, respec-
tively, the former Carlsberg brewery site and the former industrial harbour.
 Journal of Urbanism 179

Figure 8. The parallel commission for the master plan was won by Entasis architects in 2008.
Temporary use and participatory culture came in after the master planning was done as a part of the
Carlsberg development strategy to attract future users. The temporary use and participatory design
are not integrated in the final architectural solution.
Source: Plan and three-dimensional rendering by Entasis. Photos: Kristine Samson.
180 L. Fabian and K. Samson

Without the vast distribution of images on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere
on the Internet, the glorification and drama of temporary sites’ DIY initiatives and the
rethinking of authentic urban places like the brewery and the industrial harbour risk having
very little impact. Today, for instance, the High Line (now also known as the High Line
Park), a disused elevated part of the New York Central Railroad, has its own Flickr
account where visitors and tourists upload scenic pictures. By the simple participatory act
of sharing their experiences with others, they are disseminating the urban aesthetics of the
High Line worldwide. Such sharing, however, is not DIY urbanism but viral, affective and
participatory visual marketing and place-making. The same processes have been operating
on a smaller scale for development projects such as Carlsberg City. They deeply depend
on strategic communication of urban aesthetics, of the urban space eventalization of an
industrial setting by means of concerts and cultural happenings. Thus what may appear as
DIY cultures and bottom-up initiatives, say, letting young people arrange open-air concerts
as has been the case in Carlsberg City, may at the same time be heavily supported by
strategic planning and communication, in which developers see a direct linkage between
future investment and the everyday staging of urban qualities by citizens in the neighbour-
hood. How, then, should we regard DIY initiatives when strategic developers cleverly
absorb and implement urban tactics in their strategic planning?
As Zukin states in critiquing the consumption of “the authentic city”, “it’s clear that
media images and consumer tastes anchor today’s technology of power in our individual
yearnings persuading us that consuming the authentic city has everything to do with aes-
thetics and nothing to do with power” (Zukin 2010, 229). The result, according to Zukin,
should not be understood simply as gentrification, but something more paradoxical: when
all cities pursue the same creative image, what we end up with is not authenticity, but “an
overbearing sameness” (231). We will discuss and address some of this critique below.

Questioning DIY urban design

As the examples above demonstrate, planning for these new hybrid spaces is not an easy
process; sometimes the results have been criticized for being based on a superficial, con-
sumerist or aesthetic instrumentalization of “difference”. Many of these new initiatives
partake in the aestheticization of social life. Zukin diagnoses the changes in the contempo-
rary city as “a paradigm shift from a city of production to a city of consumption” (Zukin
2010, 221). She identifies a destination culture in cities around the world; a transformation
that leads to new beginnings for the city “in post-industrial production and leisure con-
sumption” (237).
The aestheticizing processes described by Zukin ring true for the cases mentioned
above. The Carlsberg development and Enghave Minipark draw upon a notion of authen-
ticity, whether it refers to the authenticity of growing your own vegetables or the authen-
ticity of the Enghave Minipark furniture. However, as the case of Enghave Minipark
illustrates, the transformation of both urban sites and buildings are not only instances of
urban aestheticization and consumption, but also provide arenas for new ways of produc-
ing, socializing and negotiating meaning. Compared with the modernist planning vision, it
becomes clear that aestheticization in recent DIY urbanisms and reuse of spaces interacts
with aesthetics in a fashion that is radically different from the work of professional urban
planners and architects in, say, the High Line project.
While recent urban theories are often preoccupied with how the creative city emerges
out of capitalist orders, for instance in relation to gentrification (Anderson and Holden
2008; Pløger 2010; Zukin 1989, 2010), mass consumption and the creative class, urban
 Journal of Urbanism 181

sociology and critical geography rarely focus on the way these processes actually take
place. As suggested above, everyday life and users’ engagement with the city not only play
a key role in reassembling urban site-specific qualities, but also propose an alternative, col-
lective way of forming, assembling and performing the city – processes that include shap-
ing urban environments collectively. In short, the specific way in which these DIY and
participatory processes take place is rarely accounted for. Urban DIY projects like the afore-
mentioned relocation of beer drinkers are examples of how urban design can be developed
as a collective and participatory process. A user’s engagement with a site or building is
related not only to economic advantages of low rent, which is mentioned so often in the
literature on gentrification (Zukin 1989). Rather, these places are environs where citizens
claim the right to the city; places of social interaction and dialogue and of aesthetic produc-
tion where users, activists and artists together shape urbanity anew. In opposition to archi-
tectural planning and modernist master plans, aesthetics and form in these instances are no
longer formed by being imposed upon urban matter. On the contrary, a distinction between
users, performers and the material stage upon which they perform is not a given. In the
cases mentioned above, aesthetic form emerges out of the participatory process.
Rather, these aesthetic sites and forms arise through ludic role-playing, through perfor-
mances and even through shared knowledge exchange such as talks, community meetings
and workshops – acts that develop a discursive language on and around the site. Thus phe-
nomena and places such as unauthorized urban design interventions and the abovemen-
tioned Enghave Minipark are not merely practice oriented. They are participatory in the
way that they transform the city, while at the same time proposing a new aesthetics of
urban design. Nonetheless, these practices may also be scrutinized as to how they shape
urban spaces and how they create alternative communities.
Consequently, we acknowledge that while bottom-up initiatives and DIY urbanism
increasingly play an important role in urban development, they are much too often swal-
lowed up on a strategic level by financial interests and traditional master planning. Experi-
ence economy is based on a money economy. In these cases, the production of
experiences and affective responses to urban environments are handled strategically. How-
ever, that does not mean that DIY culture and bottom-up initiatives do not afford a way
out for urban development, architecture and planning. Rather, they illustrate the need for
planners, architects and developers to learn from DIY cultures and urban activism – and
not only in terms of strategic communication. In particular, they can learn new ways of
operating: how to transform a city by means of its own energetic fabric and the engage-
ment of its residents. Maybe urban culture is collective per definition and collective culture
is what shapes the public spaces today (Amin 2008). However, DIY urbanism takes it a
step further as it recognizes the value of community-based efforts in planning. This was
already anticipated in Lefebvre’s writing about la vie quotidienne. According to Lefebvre
(1991), the right to the city is not just a question of rights within it. In his 1986 formula-
tion of the right to the city, he refers to enabling citizens to participate in the use and pro-
duction of urban space. He defends citizens’ right to participation – the right to access and
influence the decisions and processes that generate space; and citizens’ right to appropria-
tion – the right to access, occupy and use space; as well as the right to create new space
that responds to their emotions, dreams and needs; notably their need to socialize and
express creativity. As we have shown, DIY urbanism is about both play and politics, and
exploring its characteristics and qualities poses unanswered questions. What does it take
for an act to be political? What does it take for a city to be a place for empowering forms
of participatory citizenship – and for sociality and solidarity with people who are not and
should not be like ourselves? And what does it mean to have a right to the city?
182 L. Fabian and K. Samson

Answers could be to recognize temporary use and DIY urbanism as more than a fash-
ionable part of the discourse and toolbox of urban planning. DIY urbanism address how
our way and quality of life and sociality can be connected to co-production, design and
use of the environment. Right to the city could in this perspective mean the right to co-de-
sign the city.
Furthermore, DIY urbanism is especially relevant in this time of economic and envi-
ronmental crisis because it explores and develops ways of designing in which the urban
environment can be reused, changed and perceived as an valuable resource. But if DIY
urbanism should be integrated in planning as a the citizen’s right to co-design, modernist
planning approaches must be rethought. As we have shown with the Carlsberg case, it is
paradoxical to work with both master planning and DIY urbanism and participatory
approaches, especially when DIY urbanism is not integrated in the master plan, but only
serves as place branding with no impact on the final design. Therefore, the fundamental
thought in architectural master planning must be rethought to allow for DIY activism to be
integrated as an equal partner in the planning process. In this perspective, Enghave Square
and the process of relocating the beer drinkers is a best practice as it was a co-creation
between citizen–users, professional planners and architects and resulted in a new public
park. Thus, balancing DIY urbanism with strategic planning demands that we integrate
collective approaches and temporary design in the final design solution. In general, it calls
for an understanding of how cities are reborn and reinterpreted through constant
agglomerations and struggles between citizen groups, professional architects, designers
and planners alike.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note
1. An important text promoting the term “tactical urbanism” has been the guidebook Tactical
Urbanism 2: Short-Term Action, Long-Term Change, which is offered for free downloading by
the Street Plans Collective.

Notes on contributors
Louise Fabian is Associate Professor at Institute for Culture and Society, University of Aarhus,
Denmark. Fabian explores the intersections between the spatial, social and cultural. Important research
areas are e.g. urbanism, DIY culture, cultural resistance, activism, the spatial turn and urban design. She
has published several articles on spatial thinking, urban culture, DIY urbanism and social movements.
Amongst others ‘The spatial turn within social and cultural studies: – Spatial theory as an interdisci-
plinary praxis’ (2013), ‘Conjunctions: Introducing Cultural Participation as a Transdisciplinary Project’
(2014) with Stephensen, J. L., Reestorff, C. M., Fritsch, J. & Stage, C., ‘Do-It-Yourself Urbanism –
from ludic tactics to strategic planning’ (2014) with K. Samson. She has co-edited a special issue on
Social Movement and Protest and a special issue on The Spatial Turn in the journal Slagmark.

Kristine Samson is Associate Professor at Performance Design, University of Roskilde Denmark.

Her research interests are urbanism, art in public and the performativity of urban design and archi-
tecture. She has published several articles on urban design and art. Among others an article on
sound art in the expanded “Urban Sound Ecologies” with Sanne Krogh Groth published in Sound
Effects 2014, and art and activism in the article “The Art of Participation” published in Kultur &
Klasse 2014 with Judith Schwarzbart. She has co-edited a volume on Situated Design Methods on
MIT Press 2014 and written an article on process design in the article “Emergent Urban Design” in
 Journal of Urbanism 183

the same volume. Finally she is the co-author with Louise Fabian on the article” DIY Urban
Design: Between ludic tactics and strategic planning” in the volume Enterprising Initiatives,
Routledge 2014. She is currently working on a research project on the performative city.

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