This trend of spontaneous interventions has arisen in just a couple of decades. So where did it come from? These interventions do have deeply rooted historical antecedents, though the most obvious precursors have only been a part of urban life in recognizable forms for the last half-century. For example, the first academic program in urban design was founded (at Harvard, in 1960) and that the discipline has become an issue of social concern (Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities a year later).
Critical site-specific interventions were pioneered by the Situationists in the 1960s. Related so-called culture-jamming practices, from guerrilla theater to flash mobs, have since become common in art and activism. Graffiti-writing emerged alongside hip-hop in Philadelphia and New York, then diversified globally in the form of urban street art by the mid-1990s.
The projects that we call “spontaneous interventions” came about in step with these other movements. Gordon Matta-Clark’s seminal Anarchitecture projects of the early 1970s (including an early pop-up restaurant in SoHo) embraced Situationist and deconstructionist ideals in altering existing urban structures. Guerrilla gardening first appeared in 1973 along with squatting and other place-based strategies that were used to resist development in New York’s Lower East Side. The installation of public seating and repurposing of infrastructure such as fire hydrants derive in part from informal urban spatial experiments of the late 1960s as well as public and interventionist art in the 1960s and 1970s. And they are even more connected to the street art installations and “place hacking” that have arisen in the last decade. Other standout examples—including faux-official signage, street improvements, and aspirational development strategies—appear even more recently. (See notes at end of article, #1.)
Given that these forebears of informal design developed in close temporal proximity, we ought then to look to the several decades of urban processes and cultural shifts with which they coincided and from which they emerged. With their origins in the late 1960s and 1970s, and their own boom in just the last two decades, spontaneous interventions may be a reaction to the formalized process of urbanism itself, and they may be the unexpected byproducts of postindustrialism, globalism, or neoliberalism.
Whichever of those terms you decide to use, the world did enter a new political and economic phase beginning with the “long crisis” of global restructuring in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following the age of industrialization and Keynesian regulation, as well as—especially in the United States—the postwar boom of Fordist manufacturing and suburbanization, the world’s advanced economies responded to globalization with massive economic diversification, deindustrialization, and deregulation. (See notes at end of article, #2.) These had dramatic impacts on the spatial organization of cities. (The city is, after all, in the words of Henri Lefebvre, “a projection of society on the ground.”) (See notes at end of article, #3.)
What scholars Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore have called the “neoliberalization” of the city, which has been dominant since the 1970s, amounts to state disinvestment and an unflinchingly market-based regulatory environment that “strives to intensify commodification in all realms of social life” and essentially opens urban development to the whims of capital. (See notes at end of article, #4.) The result is a general intensification of unevenness across urban space—a help-yourself city in which one area might see the spoils of global finance and urban renewal while another sees utter neglect. (See notes at end of article, #5.) Considering these circumstances, a trend toward do-it-yourself urban improvement seems a pretty reasonable response. Whimsical installations, spontaneous beautification, creative adaptations, and street improvements are reactions to the abandonment, neglect, hyper-commodification, or overdevelopment of other spaces.
