"Lefebvre and Whyte Hit the Streets"

I had a great time at the 14th annual Chicago Ethnography Conference last week at UIC. I saw some great talks and some great friends, and got to give a paper in a neat session on Public Spaces. The paper, "Lefebvre and Whyte Hit the Streets," presents some new findings from my dissertation research on "DIY Urban Design" and is sort of a first attempt at a 'free-standing' article/chapter to come out of it. Here's the abstract:

Lefebvre and Whyte Hit the Streets
The Diffusion of Scholarly Urbanism and the Rise of the Informal Urban Designer

There are numerous ways in which people make illegal or unauthorized alterations to urban space, its uses, or meanings. This paper is based on my research into a particular type of spatial intervention: creative, highly localized, and largely anonymous practices aimed explicitly at “improving” particular aspects of the built environment without permission. Examples include people painting their own crosswalks and bicycle lanes, gardening vacant lots and public spaces, building and installing benches and other street furniture, or creating faux-official signage to promote desired civic improvements or commemorate unheralded events – what I call “do-it-yourself urban design.” We all have our assumptions about the meanings of these types of things, who makes them, why, and where, and they raise questions of context, rights, responsibilities, and perhaps unintended consequences. To that end, this paper presents one of the more unexpected and potentially significant findings - the degree to which many members of this group of informal placemakers are in fact informed by quite sophisticated knowledge of planning, design, and academic urbanism. Building from qualitative fieldwork and interviews with individuals in nine cities, I show how the ideas of professional planning and design and scholarly urban theory feature in the work of do-it-yourself urban designers. I argue that this knowledge inspires their actions, informs their justifications, and produces a self-reflexivity on their parts that at once emboldens them and raises personal ethical dilemmas about unintended consequences.