Michael Johnson takes a break on a lounge chair in the middle of Broadway in New York's Times Square. Sections of Broadway that run through Times Square and Herald Square have been closed to cars in an effort to reduce traffic and pollution, and cut down on pedestrian accidents.
Seth Wenig/The Associated Press
Progressive Planning
Cities rethink urban spaces with 'pop-up' projects
'Pop-up' urban planning gives cities the freedom to experiment with projects on a temporary basis, allowing innovative ideas a trial run without expensive commitment of taxpayer money. Cities around the world are embracing the idea, leading in many cases to permanent changes in the urban landscape
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Cyclists ride in downtown Copenhagen, the first city to experiment with "pop-up" urban planning.— Cycling Embassy of Denmark
Rethinking urban planning
The words “pop-up” have become synonymous recently with a smart, savvy form of experimentation. Usually associated with the temporary installation of a café or retail store that operates for a limited time and then disappears, pop-ups are used by chefs to try out restaurant concepts, while brands employ them to gauge the interest and spending habits of specific neighbourhoods.
Now, cities around the world have embraced the idea of pop-up urban planning, experimenting with temporary projects as a way to build public support for an idea, circumvent city hall, or iron out the wrinkles in a municipal pipedream.
The idea was first employed in Copenhagen in the 1950s, when the now famously pedestrian-friendly city was debating whether to close Strøget Street to car traffic. With the public firmly opposed the idea, the city announced it would close the road over the Christmas holiday as an experiment.
It has remained closed ever since.
Today, pop-up urban planning is, well, popping up everywhere, from temporary seating areas in Vancouver to high tech-tourist kiosks in Paris and the surprisingly successful transformation of New York City’s famed Times Square into a car-free zone.
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Michael Johnson takes a break on a lounge chair in the middle of Broadway in New York's Times Square. Sections of Broadway that run through Times Square and Herald Square have been closed to cars in an effort to reduce traffic and pollution, and cut down on pedestrian accidents.— Seth Wenig/The Associated Press
New York City
If there is a reigning Queen of Pop-Up, it is Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York city transportation commissioner. In 2009, Ms. Sadik-Khan famously closed Times Square to traffic, transforming it into a pedestrian mall by simply throwing down some pylons and offering a smattering of lawn chairs. Although some drivers howled, Ms. Sadik-Khan was ready for the criticism, and began citing statistics she gathered by closely tracking the experiment.
The city quickly found that revenues from businesses in Times Square had risen 71 per cent, and that injuries to motorists and passengers in the project areas dropped 63 per cent. The city installed GPS units into 13,000 taxis so that the Department of Transportation could track the impact on car traffic, and found that northbound trips in the west midtown area around Times Square were actually 17 per cent faster.
The pop-up projects didn’t stop there.
Ms. Sadik-Khan brought temporary public swimming pools onto Manhattan streets last summer, and, over the course of a single weekend, she turned a Brooklyn parking lot into a park by painting a white border and filling it in with green to represent grass. “It was a quick way of showing you can transform a space in a matter of hours instead of a matter of years,” she told Esquire magazine. She performs most of her transformations without capital funds from the city, scrounging up cash and resources and avoiding actually asking permission.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has embraced the tactic, and now uses the term “pilot project” to introduce programs into other departments, including education, making them exempt from the usual approval processes.
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Paris is promoting projects that are high-tech, environmentally conscious and focused on making the city easier to navigate for locals and tourists.
Paris
At the beginning of the month, the City of Lights turned on 40 temporary urban design projects that will remain on display until December, when residents will be invited to offer their thoughts on which to keep and which to ditch. Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor in charge of innovation, described the project as transforming the city into an “experimental laboratory” for urban design.
Most of the projects are high-tech, environmentally conscious and focused on making the city easier to navigate for locals and tourists. There are parking detectors that guide drivers to available spaces and wi-fi enabled hammocks along the famed Champs-Elysees.
Outside Saint-Sulpice, the 17th century church beloved by tourists, a kiosk has been built to send virtual postcards. In back alleys and low-traffic streets, illuminated, energy-efficient footprints embedded in the ground will guide pedestrians. There are electric car chargers and portable, collapsible patio seating built into a kind of trailer, which is driven into a parking spot and unfolded: voila!
Half of the projects were subsidized by the city, given about €30,000 euros, or just more than $40,000.
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City councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam wants to reduce the stretch of Yonge Street between Dundas and Gerrard to two lanes of traffic.— KPMB Architects
Toronto
When city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam pitches a proposal to revamp Yonge Street this fall, she will use the pop-up notion to sugar-coat her idea.
The downtown councillor wants to reduce the stretch of Yonge between Dundas and Gerrard to two lanes of traffic, making it more pedestrian friendly. But Ms. Wong-Tam is smart enough to know that the city’s current administration is not going to be enthusiastic about green-lighting something that affects drivers, so she’s looking for permission to try the idea out.
She will ask council to vote in favour of a pilot project that would introduce the new streetscape through the use of removable landscaping. “We’re saying rather than making this an all-or-nothing decision, next spring let's do a trial in a very inexpensive way with temporary landscaping and just see how it works,” said Ken Greenberg, the urban planner who created the Yonge Street Master Plan at Ms. Wong-Tam’s request. “The fact is, you learn from doing those. There’s a lot of specifics to sort out.”
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Calgary is testing a pilot project that will allow parking on the curbsides of its busy Edmonton Trail. - Chris Bolin for The Globe and Mail
Calgary
During the week, Calgary’s Edmonton Trail carries about 22,000 vehicles in and out of the city. But on the weekend, traffic along the road dramatically decreases.
In an effort to transform the rapidly gentrifying area along the car route into a more walkable neighbourhood, the city has opened up the road’s curb lanes to free parking on weekends.
Alderman Gian-Carlo Carra has said the pilot project could be expanded to include weekday, off-peak parking on Edmonton Trail and other city commuter routes in an effort to change their dynamic from car-focused to community building. “I think it’s sort of testimony to the new approach city hall is taking, which is, ‘Let’s try things,’” said Mr. Carra.
To test the impact of the experiment, the city is installing temporary traffic cameras along the street, and will perform traffic and parking counts throughout the summer.
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Visitors pack Granville Street during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The busy street will be closed this summer as part of the city's VIVA Vancouver project. - Rafal Gerszak for The Globe and Mail
Vancouver
A temporary summer experiment has become a permanent part of the West Coast landscape through VIVA Vancouver, a city-run summer program that creates car-free streets and corridors across the metropolis. It all began with a pilot proposal in 2009 to have roving closings across the city to make different neighbourhoods pedestrian-only.
“Half our budget was dedicated to evaluating the impact,” said Andrea Reimer, a city councillor behind the project. “We wanted to understand all the different impacts: on pedestrians, on stores, on everyone.”
As part of the trial period, the inaugural VIVA Vancouver closed a different section of the city’s busy Main Street every weekend. From an urban planning perspective, it allowed city officials to see which ones created the biggest disruption and how traffic dispersed.
The program is now a permanent feature in the city, and receives funding through the annual budget. But VIVA retains its experimental tone by selecting different neighbourhoods each year through an open application process.
This year’s VIVA closes Granville Street to car traffic and puts a modular seating deck in the Mount Pleasant area of Main Street that will provide free, “no-purchase-necessary” seating for pedestrians. The idea was borrowed from similar pop-up seating experiments in San Francisco and New York.
“I don’t see a future where any street is only used for one thing. We need our roads for movement during the week, but on the weekends, we need them for recreation,” Ms. Reimer said. “By trying things out, it really just makes people rethink public space.”
