From Parklets to People St.: City of L.A. Offers "DIY Kits" for Community Placemaking

One of the more important themes in my dissertation research on "do-it-yourself urban design" has turned out to be the increasingly obvious interaction between the tactics and aesthetics of informal, unauthorized community improvements and those of very official streetscape redesign efforts by some trend-setting major cities.

Probably the best example is the evolution, over a period of several years, of the once-clandestine Park(ing) Day movement into an international phenomenon (now often appropriated by local businesses and certified by authorities) and into the popular progressive planning trend of parklets. In San Francisco, where Park(ing) Day started with the radical architecture and design collective Rebar converting a single parking space into a temporary park in 2005, the idea was swiftly embraced by city officials and neighborhood boosters as a quick, cheap way to provide just the sort of novel public space amenities that hip young urbanites are looking for - some much larger than a parking space, some funded by major corporations, some designed by Rebar, now a successful agency with major civic clients. (The SF city planning department celebrates a variety of other "tactical interventions" as well). Many other cities have created official parklet programs too (I was interviewed in 2012 for an article about parklets in Chicago).

Well, the top-down embrace of DIY urbanism aesthetics continues at a fever pitch today with the City of Los Angeles's "People St." initiative. (Here's the post on the subject that caught my eye.) The City's Dept. of Transportation is officially asking citizens to use approved design "kits" to help create parklets, plazas, and bike corrals in order to "transform underused areas of L.A.'s largest public asset - our 7,500 miles of city streets - into active, vibrant, and accessible public space." Community groups can apply beginning today.

The City of Angels has fully embraced the language and the aesthetic of DIY and combined it with an official standardized process (plus a little cross-promotion thrown in for good measure).  As Victoria Young reports for PSFK:

The goal of the program is to improve the quality of life of Angelenos by providing a toolkit of cost-efficient design elements that can be quickly installed to help the city come alive with minimalist wood and steel planter boxes full of succulents, sleek picnic tables, and even GameTime exercise equipment [...]. Each kit contains packaged, required configurations for Plazas, Parklets, and Bike Corrals to choose from. Specifications provided in these documents simplify and automate the process, efficiently eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel for each project and streamlining the workflow with thoughtfully pre-approved design kits.

A parklet on Spring St. in Downtown Los Angeles. Source: Drew Ackerman, Flickr.

Some examples of the types of projects that People St. is promoting already exist in Los Angeles, including the above parklet, this bike corral in Highland Park, and the Sunset Triangle plaza in Silverlake. There's a lot to like here, whether or not one views this trend as DIY urban design "selling out" in a sense.  And the L.A. effort certainly responds to a need, not only for more public space and bicycle infrastructure at the expensive cars, but among citizens to make positive changes themselves. Several of my interviewees there said quite explicitly that they "wish the city would do it" so that they wouldn't have to. As one male cycling activist put it, "if there’s a place where we can do it […] up to spec and everything, we should be able to put it in ourselves."  This is pretty much exactly what LADOT is hoping. 

Of course, there are still reasons to keep a critical eye on these efforts. Not least is that, while they are touted as ways of expanding a city's public space (they are, after all, small parks), from the way the application/approval process is structured to the basic realities of contemporary urban economics, they can tend to wind up as little more than cute extensions of an adjacent business (which is often responsible for upkeep, bringing chairs in at night, etc). If something is essentially designed to look like outdoor seating for a sidewalk cafe, it may not appear at all welcoming or accessible to everyone no matter how many signs define its public-ness. And then there's the question of whether such hip improvements can be viewed as indicators (or even catalysts) of gentrification... but that's an argument for another day. For now, L.A.'s effort does at least seem to indicate a broadly positive (and refreshing) step among city officials and planners there, one that does justice to what Mayor Garcetti calls the "fundamental shift in how we make our city streets safer and more enjoyable."