The ideal city doesn’t exist, of course, just as the ideal person doesn’t exist. But sights must be set high, with a combination of optimism and not just know-how but do-how, if we will ever approximate the just, sustainable, happy, healthy urban existence we all crave. Worth highlighting are four overriding themes that seem to pervade every one of the 124 projects: Citizenship, Equity, Protest, and Participation. These are elaborated upon in the four sidebars of this essay (thanks to Michael Sorkin for his eloquence).
Participation
The worst enemy of democracy is indifference. Every project featured in Spontaneous Interventions is a testament to its opposite: participation. Across the U.S. and indeed the world, design activists and community organizers are inventing new practices to make their own—and their neighbors’—environments richer, more responsive, and more definitively theirs.
Spontaneous Interventions is not the first to recognize this uprising, and it’s just the tip of an iceberg. Other projects, notably the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s fine exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City, Ole Bouman’s Studio for Unsolicited Architecture at the NAi, the exhibition Hands-on Urbanism at the Architekturzentrum Wien, the Hack the City festival in Dublin, TED’s City 2.0 competition, Kylie Legge’s book Doing It Differently, Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams’ book The Temporary City, Nato Thompson’s (who also wrote an essay, here) exhibition Living as Form, and various other recent efforts—these all signal a Zeitgeist, each adding a new wrinkle of understanding to a broad movement.
“Elections don’t mean shit—Vote where the power is—Our power is in the street.” This was the resolution adopted by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1968, advocating a true participatory democracy. “Taking it to the streets” remains as thrilling and energizing as it ever was, maybe even more so with the possibility of even minor acts going viral. Still, Spontaneous Interventions documents a rebellion, not a revolution: These micro urban moments—vast in numbers, ephemeral, situational, intelligent, idiosyncratic—can’t replace the effectiveness and reach of top-down planning. But somewhere in between, the two seem to be finding common ground. Some of the interventions featured in this exhibition have in fact made institutional inroads—Rebar’s PARK(ing) Day has morphed into city-issued Parklet Permits in San Francisco and Pop-Up Café licenses in New York, for example. New York and Washington, D.C., have launched competitions, making city data available for anyone to transform into apps that make them more navigable, transparent, accountable, democratic. Commons-based solutions are taking hold everywhere. One senses a relaxing sense of proprietariness all around. These are signs of triumph, and encouragement to any budding urban interventionist.