A Low Traffic Neighbourhood project in Onehunga, using tactical urbanism, is a theatre for some very familiar angst – but also some very unfamiliar progress.

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A bunch of towns are discovering tactical urbanism right now through the Innovating Streets for People programme, and Onehunga’s is a good example of the type. There’s a great piece on it by RNZ, which does a good job of summarising it all (click the image if you want to read it).

What’s different about this project and its peers?

A new (for NZ) process, tactical urbanism, is the main novelty of the Innovating Streets for People programme, that’s funding the Onehunga Low Traffic Neighbourhood and dozens of others around the country. While it’s great to get towns turning the dial on street environments, making them more about people and less about cars, the real power is doing so using tactical urbanism techniques.

Tactical urbanism’s most visible difference from normal street change processes is in this diagram below: you install street improvements quickly with moveable gear, and adapt them quickly based on live feedback and monitoring.

This inaugural round of the Innovating Streets programme is a “lite” version of tactical urbanism for a few reasons, mostly because it’s so time-constrained – few towns are managing to do a decent length trial. But fundamentally, tactical urbanism improves our physical environments fast and well, and builds community capability and participation while it does so.

Both street improvement and great community participation should be far more mainstream in the professions that change existing streets, so towns should embrace tactical urbanism with open arms as a brilliant entry-level way to start mainstreaming this goodness.

So why the angst in Onehunga (and many other Innovating Streets towns)?

Is it just people hating on anything that cramps our accustomed car-driving style?

In part, yes (cos Kiwis are very very good at that (check out classic stuff in the RNZ/Checkpoint audio from the mum who complains about the safer streets turning her two minute drive into a whopping twelve minutes). But that’s a tale as old as …well, the last few decades.

What’s interesting is this – the complaints about process:

“The way they’ve gone about it” process complaint usually has two flavours:

1. Well I personally didn’t hear about it, and my [friend / family / neighbour] didn’t either, therefore they’ve SPRUNG IT ON US
2. All this gear just APPEARED IN THE STREET before any Normal Community Consultation (and I just don’t believe all those people telling me it’s a trial) I want a Proper Community Consultation like I’m used to

The Onehunga article’s author Matthew Hutching helpfully outlines what public advertising the project did do, which for this case deals pretty well to no. 1, “I didn’t hear about it” dimension.

So let’s focus on 2.

[As we do so, let’s give folks like Ms Bates the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Let’s assume that in her calls for “community consult [sic]”, she’s not one of those individuals who relishes getting their keyboard warrior on and automatically opposing good street-change projects from the comfort of their home computer, from a quick glance at the consultation documents. Let’s assume those concerns are genuine, and she’s heard the project saying “it’s just a trial, come and try it and tell us what you think”, and has looked up the Innovating Streets webpage, and despite all that she’s still just scared because she hasn’t yet been able to fill in a box saying “DO YOU SUPPORT OR OPPOSE THIS PROJECT – PLEASE TICK ONE”.]

“Proper Consultation” vs experiential consultation

So, Regular Citizen, nobody’s come asking you to support or oppose based on some pictures in PDFs, and stuff has just appeared in your street? That’s good news.

For your own sake and your community’s, you actually don’t want Proper Consultation before anything appears in the street. This is what you want:

Waka Kotahi say:

One reason to choose temporary techniques over normal project processes is that they enable ‘experiential’ engagement and consultation. Rather than just testing designs on paper, communities can interact with proposed street changes in real life in a low-stakes context that can be adapted.

This in-world testing of Innovating Streets projects places them in front of street users, helping address the challenges of generating awareness and response typically associated with engaging with communities on street design. This can lead to more diverse (and larger numbers) of people having an informed say – a key benefit as the diversity of people in silent majorities can be greater than in the groups who typically tend to speak up and be heard. Giving a platform to less-heard voices not only helps the more vocal and engaged sectors of the community appreciate the demographic diversity of local people who actually use streets, it ultimately enables councils to meet more of the local population’s needs.

Innovating Streets for People website

Less diplomatically, this means three massive advantages over normal consultation processes.

Massive Advantage 1: You can give proper feedback, from your own perspective.

• You can walk, scoot, wheel, bike through the reshaped streets. You can look around, listen, smell things. You can sit and chat. You can experience for yourself, with your own senses.
• It doesn’t matter that you have no personal memories of what it’s like walking, sitting, chatting in a trully well-designed, people-centric street. “I’ve NEVER seen ANYTHING like that, cars are vital to everything we do, I can’t BEGIN to imagine how a “pro people” street would work!” You’re not alone! Most Kiwis haven’t travelled overseas to cities with streets like that. Most of us haven’t immersed ourselves in those environments nor saved up the memories to whip out in a street change project back home and years later.
• It doesn’t matter, because unlike normal consultation processes, this tactical urbanism project isn’t forcing you to give feedback on something that’s totally foreign to your experience, with nothing but artists’ impressions to help. Instead, a live trial is letting you get face to face and in amongst the very stuff you’re being asked to comment on. You can scope it out from every angle, in real life, a real-time and immediate experience of your own.

Massive Advantage 2: You can see others experiencing it too.

• You’ll be able to see them reacting to the new stuff, interacting with the street with all their senses the way you are. Odds are some of them won’t be like you: they’ll be older, younger, with different bodies or ethnicities, they might drive / bike / use a wheelchair which you don’t. They might have the same tastes as you in street art, or totally different ones.  But they’ll be your neighbours, and you’ll be seeing their experiences.
• And Janet, Chair of the Residents’ Association, also sees all kinds of locals experiencing the street, and having opinions about the layout. The experiences and opinions of your kids playing in the street for the first time… of the old kuia from the corner who never usually comes out because she’s afraid to cross the road… of the homeless guy who quietly sifts around the park now checking out the artwork… of the new refugee family without much English enjoying the seats in the sun. All just as valid as the experiences and opinions of Janet the Treasurer of the Residents’ Association. They all see this, and she sees it too.
• And that’s great.

Massive Advantage 3: All the inevitable micro-scale bugs in the design get sorted quickly, in real time.

• On day 1 of the trial your friendly shopkeeper Barry was grumping to anyone who’d listen about how that planter box was put in two feet too far that way and his delivery boys wouldn’t be able to get their truck in on Tuesdays. But the project team scoped it out with him, talked to a few other people, then overnight they got their little forklift and moved the planter one-and-a-half feet (which was all it needed).
• This happens dozens of times during the first few days of live trialling in tactical urbanism projects. It removes the distracting buzzing of issues with micro-bugs, leaving you free to consider the fundamental changes to the street on their merits.

Why not have both – traditional consultation and live trial?

Some councils are running their Innovating Streets projects with a normal consultation before a tactical urbanism live trial, and the argument’s being made that live, adaptive trials should just be added to the normal process for street change: do a consultation about what’s been co-designed for trial. Folks like Heather “Community Consult” Bates would probably be happy with this.

Simply adding in a trial as well might seem logical until you step back a pace and look at it in context. And then you see two powerful reasons why not. The first is about general process, the second about co-design – but both are about saying “Nah” to councils’ bad tendencies.

1. No, because general process

As a rule, when you compare current “consult before anything’s in the street” processes for making streets more about cars, to current processes for making streets more about people, it already takes crazy amounts of time and energy for the latter compared to pro-car (anti-people) projects. (More on that to come in a future post.)

The sheer length of time and magnitude of effort for good change are precisely why tactical urbanism is getting wildly popular worldwide because it’s a much simpler, more elegant process, that allows communities to get over the fears that have fed the proliferation of process around good change. And it’s one of the big reasons why Waka Kotahi made up New Zealand’s tactical urbanism scheme, the Innovating Streets programme.

So simply adding yet another step on top of current, tortuous processes for good change? That’s a nope from me.

2. No, because it encourages poor codesign

If council think they’ll get to do a normal community consultation anyway, thus protecting themselves from “poor process!” criticism, they’re likely to undercook the other crucial element of tactical urbanism process that comes before live trialling: community codesign.

It’s this stage that’s supposed to decide what street changes will be trialled at all. And it’s the opportunity for the council to build some trust with the locals: you can say “This “innovative” design hasn’t been cooked up by some technocrats in an office, it’s been designed with a group of real locals who you trust. They participated really deeply so you didn’t have to, and you can trust the trial design that they’ve come up with, much more than you would normally trust a “preferred option” from council.”

This codesign stage is vital for two reasons. Firstly, for building trusted local champions who can convince their fellow citizens to at least give the changes a try. Secondly, for getting a genuinely “roughly right” design which has the fewest possible bugs to fix (specialist engineers and designers can only go so far: only local knowledge can help prevent most bugs).

But councils have lots of incentives to codesign-wash: to do it tokenistically, to under-resource it, to not really do the small but crucial bit of power transfer to community that’s at the heart of a real participatory process.

And if there’s a normal consultation process as a backstop, this will undermine both the sense of responsibility from the community members doing codesign (which typically demands a huge commitment of time and energy), and the incentives to get it really roughly right. So the pressure on codesign, of “what we’re coming up with is what’s going to go out in the street for feedback”, is really healthy.

Watch this space

I’m willing to bet that towns that have done a decent tactical urbanism process (codesign then installation and live trialling/experiential consultation) will be hearing strong calls for more, bigger, deeper Innovating Streets projects and processes. Once you’ve experienced decent tactical urbanism for street change, you never want to go back to the regular old community consultation!

If you have a tactical urbanism project happening near you, find out – how genuine is the co-design? How thorough is the live trial? Is there a commitment to learning (FFS), transparently?

If the council isn’t going hard on this stuff, they’re probably selling you short…

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Image credits:

• Banner image: Ki Raranga Tapata (from Facebook)
• Three-phase trial diagram: Waka Kotahi’s draft Tactical Urbanism Handbook (artist: Resilio Studio)
• box with kids’ painting and signs – Peter McGlashan (from Twitter)
• Blue diagram: Porirua City Council’s explanation of tactical urbanism (artist: Nick Meli – messy markup by the author)
• Onehunga people looking at the installations – Peter McGlashan (from Twitter)
• Straw-snake tactical urbanism installations: South Bend, Indiana

Tags: tactical urbanism