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On the emerging urbanism
of small acts -
Fran Tonkiss is the director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. Discussing the topics of self-help, appropriation and the benefits of collective design in the city with Francesca Ferguson, she demands that urban design needs to be much more than technical expertise.
In your view, what makes the renegotiation of shared spaces and resources so pertinent within the economy of austerity that still prevails in greater parts of Europe?
Public cuts and private exclusions are beating back the spaces, resources and services that are held or used in common. We’ve relied on the state to maintain common assets as public goods, but this is undermined by austerity economics. A politics of the commons is about mobilising against cuts and closures, and defending sites of common use that remain. It’s also about creative acts of “commoning” that go beyond the state – in occupations and informal appropriations, autonomous social services, pooling of land and resources – to provide access to shared spaces, economic and social goods.
You say that the transformations of urban space through temporary and more permanent interventions by civic organisations and ad hoc alliances, is a kind of urbanism of small acts. What wider significance do these small acts have within an urban economy – both politically and socially?
It’s easy to dismiss practices of small urbanism as simply niche, transient or low-impact. The point is they scale up – across different sites and cities – to a broader urban political economy of investment, intervention and social return. These interventions matter because of the realities they create in place – housing, workplaces and social infrastructure, childcare and play spaces, open and green spaces, meeting places and markets, information exchanges and political venues.
Previous page: A collection of 853 alternative bank notes and coins from the fourteenth century to today. Livia Lima, “Alternative Currencies”, wood mounted photographic prints. (Photo courtesy the artist)
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The very act of instituting an alternative currency is a healthy challenge to the current financial hegemony. Livia Lima’s “Alternative Currencies”, wood mounted photographic prints. (Photo courtesy the artist)
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Fran Tonkiss is Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. Her research and teaching is in the fields of urban and economic sociology and her interests in urbanism include cities and social theory, urban development and design, urban inequalities, spatial divisions and public space. In economic sociology, her research focuses on markets, globalisation, trust and social capital.
Her publications in these fields include Space, the City and Social Theory (Polity Press, 2005), and Contemporary Economic Sociology: Globalisation, Production, Inequality (Routledge, 2006). Her most recent book is Cities by Design: the Social Life of Urban Form (Polity/Wiley, 2013).
At a larger scale, they underline the fact that a lot of what happens in cities falls outside the formal public or private economies – in self-help and mutual provision, non-market exchange, sweat-equity investments and voluntary labour, caring work and doing favours. This is about capturing economic values without commodifying them, and building social solidarities in the act of making space.
Should we be widening the notion of urban design to encompass these small acts, and what do you see as the political impact of alternative modes of collective design – including the kind of crowd-funding and “open source” urbanism that social media and technologies are enabling?
It is crucial to expand the understanding of design to include more independent and collective acts. Urban design still strongly implies technical expertise in specific sites for defined uses – or decorative gestures that have no real social use at all. But the design of cities is not just what is formally commissioned, licensed and funded. Modes of collective design have several advantages, even by standard measures. These include participation – getting beyond the ritual acts of “consultation” – meaning users are directly engaged in the work of design. As such, they are able to respond too to real active uses and expressed needs, rather than to design clichés of spatial “activation”.
Additionally in terms of the quality of design, whilst there is no guarantee that small acts, temporary solutions or collective interventions produce better spaces than big projects, they are easier to fix or undo when they go wrong. And in terms of feasibility, mixed economies of finance spread the risk, make projects less reliant on single sources, and mean that large funders can’t control design and use. These strategies take time, but so does raising public money – and crowds don’t pull out or collapse like private investors do. p
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