In the final accounting, this may be too harsh. At the very least, it is premature, and it is important to be mindful of the complexities of these situations. But the possibility that the interventions might reinforce the world they are trying to change need not take away from the value and incredible potential that is inherent in the simple act of taking urban improvement into one’s own hands. This is no small step to take. If the medium is the message, informal urbanism speaks volumes.
The phenomenon of DIY urbanism poses a fairly explicit challenge to basic assumptions about who owns, controls, designs, pays for, and makes particular spaces or types of spaces. It questions the very formality of the city and its logic of unregulated and uneven investment, and it questions the very wisdom of going through formal channels to affect local change. The movement toward informal, spontaneous, DIY urbanism suggests a more malleable, democratic, and dynamic city. This is truly the oeuvre Lefebvre described. It is the collective work of us all.
NOTES
1. I draw many of these specific details on informal designers from my ongoing research on do-it-yourself (DIY) urban design across several contexts, including my academic work on the subject at the University of Chicago. Please seediyurbandesign.com for more.
2. The list of urbanists who explore and debate these concepts is a long one, including Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Saskia Sassen, Alan Scott, and William Julius Wilson. But in particular, see Edward Soja’s work for a trenchant summary and analysis, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
3. Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 essay “The Right to the City,” in Kofman & Lebas, eds., Writings on Cities (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1996), p. 109. According to Lefebvre, in the bourgeois capitalist epoch, the city represents (even embodies) the ideology of capitalism and of organized consumption; in the next stage, what has been called neoliberalism, it is at risk of becoming “exchange value in its pure state” (p 115).
4. See Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore, “After Neoliberalization?” in Globalizations, vol. 7, no. 3 (2010), p. 310. Although the phrase is now being thrown around on a scale to match that of “globalization” a decade ago, neoliberalism has powerful descriptive value for framing many of the most urgent issues that cities—or rather, citizens—are facing today. While the argument has been made that the era of unregulated free-market capitalism came to an end, at least ideologically and politically, with the economic crisis of 2008, this perspective seems shortsighted. It has certainly not proven true in the reality of America’s cities, where inequality, commodification, gentrification, and uneven development show no signs of disappearing.
5. On uneven development, see Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1984). Also, on the so-called “Keno-capitalism” of postmodern urban space, see Michael Dear & Steven Flusty “Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 88, no. 1 (1996).
6. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. trans., S. Rendall (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 96.
7. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 26.
8. Chester Hartman, “The Right to Stay Put,” in Geisler & Popper, eds., Land Reform, American Style (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984).
