The formalities of informal improvement: technical and scholarly knowledge at work in do-it-yourself urban design

Abstract

Unauthorized yet functional and civic-minded “do-it-yourself urban design” contributions have seen growing interest in recent years. Authorities and community members alike rightfully wonder about the meanings of these actions and the questions they raise about rights, responsibilities, contexts, and consequences. Building from a multi-year study of DIY urban design across 17 cities, this paper focuses on the backgrounds and methods of these would-be local improvers. In particular, it demonstrates that many are informed by sophisticated knowledge of scholarly urban theory and official planning and design standards. Referencing debates on informality and formality in urbanism, I show that highly technical, academic, and formalized elements pervade these informal efforts, suggesting a gray area in our normative assumptions about official versus unauthorized placemaking. I argue that this knowledge enables and inspires many do-it-yourselfers’ actions and produces a complex and potentially problematic reflexivity around their place in the city and their potential impacts.

Keywords:

• DIY urban design
• do-it-yourself
• informality
• informal urbanism
• planning
• placemaking

Acknowledgements

Parts of this research were presented in earlier form at the 2011 Chicago Ethnography Conference and the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The author would like to thank the editors, anonymous referees, and colleagues at the University of Chicago and New York University for their invaluable comments and guidance in revising the manuscript.

Notes

1. As discussed at length elsewhere (Douglas 2014), the relevant existing research can be read as lumping these practices into three basic categories: criminological discourses that consider many such actions in terms of vandalism and disorder; cultural and psychological perspectives that approach some forms of unauthorized alteration as novel instances of artistic or personal expression and communication, or even popular subculture, analyzing the activities for artistic, textual, or personal meaning, but not wider context or impact; and the literature that discusses such activities in terms similar to traditional protest, often with radical political goals explicitly stated and some observers suggesting that they qualify as instances of outright “resistance” to authority, capitalism, etc. The categories are not mutually exclusive, and each perspective does describe some forms of illegal urban intervention in their own right, yet the many cases of unauthorized but civic-minded improvement discussed here do not fit primarily within any of them, and are, I argue, better understood distinctly as instances of DIY urban design.

2. See Schumaker and Getter 1977 for a revealing analysis of the race- and class-based “responsiveness bias” of local governments in the United States; also see Cavill and Sohail 2003; Hajnal and Trounstine 2014. Hajnal and Trounstine (2014, 67) also found that wealthy, white residents are more likely to “feel well represented in the local democratic arena”.

3. There is also some parallel here with the older, broader “new theory” of organic urban design promoted by Christopher Alexander and colleagues (1987), which Mehaffy (2008) argues has fairly successfully been put into practice with efforts toward participatory planning and the ideals of New Urbanism.