I'm honored to have been selected to participate in the Experience the Creative Economy conference at the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute, June 21st-23rd. I'll be speaking about my research on DIY urban design and what it may have to tell us about spatial rights and responsibilities in the so-called 'Creative City', and taking part in three days of collaborating and workshopping around issues pertaining to creativity and economic development. Here's the abstract for my paper:
Do-It-Yourself Urban Design
'Improving' the City Through Unauthorized, Creative Contributions
There are numerous ways in which people make illegal or unauthorized alterations to urban space, its uses, or meanings. This paper presents research into a particular type of unauthorized intervention: the creative, highly localized, and largely anonymous practices that are aimed explicitly at “improving” particular aspects of the built environment. In other words, informal “do-it-yourself” urban design contributions. In painting their own crosswalks and bicycle lanes, building and installing much-needed benches and other street furniture, or creating faux-official signage to promote needed civic improvements or commemorate unheralded events, people respond to perceived inadequacies in their communities and take design responsibilities into their own hands; even small-scale acts of aesthetic alteration, such as guerrilla gardening, billboard liberation, and yarn-bombing, assert a vision of the city as popular space open to creative, individual “beautification.” Building on twelve months of qualitative fieldwork and interviews with 40 individuals in six cities (London, Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and Vancouver), I distinguish these practices from “traditional” forms of illegal spatial intervention and discuss their implications for understanding our relationship to the contemporary city. We do not normally think of the urban built environment as something we can reshape at our whim; its uses and meanings are normatively – and often legally – defined and regulated, essentially altered only by professionals. That an increasing number of individuals treat the built environment as open to personal reinterpretation raises a number of questions concerning rights, responsibilities and popular expectations as well as wider and perhaps unintended consequences.
