Austerity urbanism: connecting strategies and tactics for participatory placemaking

ABSTRACT

Austerity has led to a growing interest in small-scale urban practices that engage community groups in participatory placemaking as an alternative to developing government or commercially funded parks and urban spaces. These approaches draw on bottom-up tactics to empower local community groups to take ownership of small communal spaces but are also often supported strategically by small financial grants provided by local and national governments. In this article, we draw on de Certeau’s theory of strategies and tactics to explore the relationship between top-down strategies and bottom-up tactics in urban placemaking in response to the politics of austerity. We explore this process through critical analysis of our own participatory action research project to engage in the ideation and implementation of a community-run ‘Pocket-Park’. We argue that the complex interplay between participatory bottom-up tactics and more formal top-down strategies provides an approach to placemaking that uniquely facilitates creative practice and allows for a resurgence in non-commercialised public placemaking. We identify a process of manoeuvres (or strategic tactics) between de Certeau’s two concepts in which key participants undertake a translational process, to unlock the resources needed to support tactical placemaking.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity
• participatory design
• community activism
• tactics
• strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. David Cameron brought the expression ‘age of austerity’ into mainstream parlance in the UK in his keynote speech to the Conservative Party forum in Cheltenham on 26 April 2009 (http://conservative-speeches.sayit.mysociety.org/speech/601367), in which he promised an end to ‘irresponsible’ excessive government spending. The suggestion by Lord O’Neill that the age of austerity had come to an end in 2015 was widely dismissed (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/georgeosborne/11756258/Age-of-austerity-is-over-minister-claims-despite-deep-cuts-to-come.html).

2. Civic agency is defined as ‘the capacity of each individual, working alone or in groups, to view what happens in the world in a critical way and to … bring about positive change’ (Forestiere 2015).

3. The project and its outputs have been recognised with an Honourable Mention in the Live projects Network Awards 2017 (https://designcorps.org/seed-awards-about/) and were selected as one of the ‘Best Student Design-Build Projects Worldwide 2016ʹ by ArchDaily. (http://www.archdaily.com/794566/the-best-student-design-build-projects-worldwide-2016) and is a finalist for the Green Gown Awards 2017 (http://www.greengownawards.org/2017-finalists).

4. The programme aimed to ‘increase the impact that can be achieved by making the multiple benefits a pocket park can deliver (for health, wellbeing, community integration) available to people who may not have had access to them before’ (DCLG 2015). In particular, the bids were targeted towards ‘deprived urban areas’ (DCLG, 2015).