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Strategic or Tactical?  Yes and Yes.

6/25/2015

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Enough teasing, let's finally talk about Tactical Urbanism, as I've been promising.  Like the last two posts on Agile and showing vs. telling, this post shares effective ways to bring about change.

My intent is not to cover urbanism as a philosophy, but rather to show how well-chosen short-term (tactical) actions can help achieve long-term (strategic) objectives.

In this context, urbanism refers to a movement formalized in 1993 by the Congress for the New Urbanism.  CNU describes itself as "the leading organization promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, sustainable communities and healthier living conditions."

The term "Tactical Urbanism" was coined in late 2010 when Mike Lydon and other planning professionals  gathered in New Orleans for a CNU spinoff called NextGen.  During the retreat, Lydon presented personal experiences and other stories about an emerging phenomenon -- communities staging low-cost, tactical interventions to promote and gain traction for long-term visions.

Following that collaboration, through the Streets Plan Collaborative, Lydon and his colleagues published a free, downloadable PDF book in early 2011 titled Tactical Urbanism Volume 1:  Short Term Action || Long Term Change.  After several online updates, the latest edition coauthored with Anthony Garcia is available now in print through Island Press and various retailers.


Tactical Urbanism is not a single method, but rather an accumulation of proven ideas and successful approaches from around the world.  Yet, they all share a similar premise that top-down, centrally managed, large-scale transformation programs often fail to deliver.  And many times, low-cost, bottoms-up, incremental actions can move the ball significantly forward.

One example is Open Streets, an event where communities temporarily close streets to automobile traffic, allowing people to use them for walking, bicycling, dancing, playing, and socializing.  The idea was inspired in the mid 1970s by Bogota, Colombia's "Ciclovia" -- a weekly event going strong after more than 40 years.  Each Sunday, 70+ miles of roadway are closed to car traffic, turning the streets over to an estimated two million people on bikes and/or foot.

In the United States, the Open Streets Project has identified more than 100 documented open streets events.  At a low cost in a short amount of time, these festivals demonstrate on a large scale what we were trying to accomplish with the rail trail project mentioned in my last post.  Open Streets events provide safe, accessible places for people to experience biking, walking, dancing, skateboarding, and all manner of fun, healthy outdoor recreation.  They also prove to civic leaders the public demand for such spaces.

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My hometown Atlanta holds several events each year in different neighborhoods under the banner Atlanta Streets Alive.  In 2013, I wrote a column saying Let's Go Dancing In the Streets after my personal experiences biking down Atlanta's busiest thoroughfare -- Peachtree Street.

Other Tactical Urbanism interventions with this same spirit include:

  • PARK(ing) Day -- temporarily converting on-street parking into park-like spaces.
  • Intersection Repair -- using traffic cones and other temporary structures to show how road space could be reallocated for greater safety and access.
  • Build a Better Block -- where streets are temporarily transformed using food carts, pop-up cafes, tables, temporary bike lanes, and other low-cost items to demonstrate alternative designs for the space.  (For a great example, read about the the Hampline on Broad Avenue in Memphis.)
  • Pavement to Plazas -- an intervention made famous on Memorial Day weekend 2009, when New York City transformed Times Square overnight into a make-shift pedestrian plaza free of cars.  The proof of concept has since been made permanent.
  • Little Free Library -- a grassroots movement of the sharing economy, wherein private citizens create small boxes (usually decoratively painted) and fill them with used books and the motto "Take a Book, Return a Book."

These Tactical Urbanism interventions work because these are not just random events.  To realize progress towards long-term objectives, these actions are targeted to create the right experiences to change hearts and minds and move a community together towards a now more tangible vision.

Regardless of your mission, Tactical Urbanism and its successes hold useful lessons for all of us.  You can tell people what you're trying to do, and maybe a few will follow.  But, show them, let them experience it, touch their hearts... 

Now you're going somewhere!

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Show More, Tell Less to Change the World (or Anything Else)

6/25/2015

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"I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do.
So I'll leave it up to you."
                                                                -- Alvin Lee & Ten Years After, 1971
                                                                   "I'd Love to Change the World"

Perhaps you're not out to change the world, or maybe you are.  But, no matter what the mission, every organization seeks change on some level -- be it improving a community, transforming a culture, or altering market perceptions.  Regardless of scale or motive, experience shows:

     To change the world, change minds
     To change minds, change hearts
     To change hearts, change experiences


This dependency on experiences takes us back to something I mentioned at the end of my last post, which is "Tactical Urbanism."  Authors and practitioners Mike Lydon & Anthony Garcia describe it as "neighborhood building and activation using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions and policies."  Think of it in the same vein as "seeing is believing" or "actions speak louder than words.:

In Tactical Urbanism, business methods like Agile, Lean Startup, and Continuous Improvement  are changing the game in public policy and community activism.  Likewise, the success communities  are having with these methods can reshape how businesses and non-profits pursue objectives.  But, before we delve deeper, let's revisit the fundamentals of change to reinforce why showing is so much better than telling.

Changing Minds

To alter a situation, you must change people's minds.  That's why we live in a world of debating ideas and people working to argue others over to "their side."  On difficult issues like race relations, climate science, gun control, gay marriage, and economic policy, we're barraged by arguments from many viewpoints.  Yet, how many people really change their opinion through this reasoning?  Very few.

Changing Hearts

To change minds, you must change hearts.  Even with an advanced ability to reason, human decision making is governed by emotions.  We accept this, but generally only to the extent we perceive it as lack of intellectual maturity in others.  A temporary inconvenience to overcome -- with yet more reasoning.

But, as neurologist Antonio Damasio showed in his 1994 book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, the role of emotion in human reasoning is more hardwired than we realize.  Damasio illustrates this using case studies of brain-damaged individuals who've lost connection between the rational and emotional parts of their brains.  Without access to feelings, these individuals are unable to make even basic everyday decisions using only data.


Arguing with facts is pointless if your information conflicts with the emotional reaction in others.  When fear, anxiety, anger, or suspicion are present, all data to the contrary is of little to no significance.
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I learned this a few years ago trying to persuade my community to acquire an inactive railroad corridor to convert into a walking and biking trail. 

Opponents were quick to fill newspapers and public meetings with allegations about crime, drug use, murder, rape, and "all manner of evil that man can think of" they claimed would accompany such an undertaking.  I and others responded with mountains of data to counter those fears
-- including testimonials from law enforcement, elected officials, and adjacent landowners along trails in other communities.  But, our rational argument missed the mark by failing to address emotions already stirred.

When I look back through news accounts and opinion pieces from that time, even I'm struck by the in-your-face, visceral arguments against the trail.  Our fact-filled, pro-trail arguments were simply no match for the intense emotions aroused against us.


We eventually wised up and came back to the emotions driving our desire to see a rail trail built.  We refocused from combating fear mongering to emphasizing the positive emotional connection of excited young people and active families using our trails.  We celebrated uplifting stories of people making healthy changes in their lives by getting outdoors and becoming physically active.

Changing Experiences

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To tap into those good emotions, we had to bring people a different experience.  Instead of fear and uncertainty, we needed them to see the smile on a child's face biking down a trail.  We needed them to hear the laughter and feel the warmth of a father strolling with a young son perched on his shoulders while a mother walks alongside her daughter loosely holding hands.

In time, we were fortunate to get a different, shorter trail built in our community.  It quickly became a place where anyone could experience such scenes any day of the year.  And, that experience changed hearts and minds, keeping alive the potential for acquiring the rail corridor for a longer trail.

Too Much, Too Late?

But, that shorter trail took 10 years to fund, design, and build.  It almost didn't happen and was nearly too late to change community perception before the inactive rail line was abandoned and the opportunity lost forever.    Something quicker and cheaper would have served our needs much better.

In my next post, I'll explain "Tactical Urbanism" -- a set of interventions community leaders and activists are using to create positive experiences faster and at a lower initial cost to gain traction for long-term change.  It's an approach with relevance for any organization or cause.

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    Author

    Maurice Carter is Founder and President of Breathe-Water, LLC.  Views expressed here are his alone and do not represent any organization with which he is affiliated.

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