All of this is which to say, Spontaneous Interventions is informed by innumerable factors and desires, and is comprised of countless parallel strands of thinking, each deserving of longer analyses—much longer than we are able to cover in this monograph issue of architect, though our insightful contributors do a fantastic job of touching on dominant influences and themes. When you have 124 projects, you find yourself doing a lot of taxonomizing, deliberating whether projects should be grouped by type (infrastructure, landscape, digital, process, art), by scale, by problem. Every way you cut it, intriguing patterns and trends surfaced. For example, a good dozen projects deal with food. Another dozen or so deal with vacancies or underutilized public land. A handful deal with play. At least three address POPS (privately own public spaces) specifically. Ten or so were crowdfunded through Kickstarter. Twenty-odd are information projects, printed or digital resources aimed at sharing, disseminating, digesting, mapping, or visualizing information. The majority of the projects by far are located in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, suggesting that big urban centers with high concentrations of creatives are especially fertile ground. This kind of breakdown could go on.
Protest
At the heart of Spontaneous Interventions lies a subversive streak. These unsolicited and unauthorized acts are de facto forms of rebellion, critiques of cities as they exist. The settlements that sprang to life in 2011 demonstrate that cities have always been scenes of democratic expression. Like mass protest, interventions are forms of local advocacy that demand a better city, society, and world.
We did decide to encode one level of analysis, asking our protagonists to assess the type of improvements their projects brought about, choosing from six categories: information, accessibility, community, economy, sustainability, and pleasure. The reason for this exercise was to understand the desires of the actors and what they hoped their actions would accomplish. Each category was assigned a color, allowing us to create a sort of bar code to quickly convey the essence of each project.
The proportions of the colors seen on the cover reflect the average of the 124 projects in the exhibition. By a wide margin, community (pink) is the category cited most by interventionists. So while a project like San Francisco Garden Registry is overtly about mapping and quantifying the amount of urban farms in the city, its creators, Futurefarmers, note that building community is an equally important aspect of this online resource; or while Intersection Repair in Portland, Ore., appears to be about slowing down traffic in unsafe intersections by painting them into plazas, it is primarily a community-building exercise that brings neighbors together in a common annual task; or that artist Candy Chang’s I Wish This Was sticker campaign in New Orleans has inspired similar public message boards across the country, all in the name of sparking civic engagement. The overwhelming concern for community is a resounding affirmation of people’s desire to connect to each other and their belief that a strengthened community is the baseline for creating responsive, successful urban environments.
We asked our participants to name their inspirations as well as ideas about the ideal city, capturing some responses in filmed interviews that will appear in the Pavilion as well as online. We prompted participants to think big, blue sky, and to argue their case as if they were running for office: It’s an election year, after all. Some participants cite a generational shift, with Millennials and their heightened expectation of immediate results and collaborative exchange. Others cite a disappointment with institutions and a lack of confidence in their ability to solve problems. Some feel that every act is political, while others don’t self-identify as activists at all, but simply as conscientious citizens who hate to see a wasted opportunity. Many are as well versed in Guy Debord and David Harvey as in Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch. Some are running away from the dullness of their suburban upbringings. Situationism, Archigram, Abbie Hoffman, squatter settlements, Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow, Fluxus, Dada, Jersey Devils, William Whyte are cited alongside democracy, equal rights, hacking, government efficiency, a desire for human interaction, a backlash against the car—the list of references runs long.