Tactical Urbanism and DIY architecture

The title above is the one of my Thesis Dissertation presented at FAUP in 2018. In 2021 an editor asked me to publish it as a book, that you can buy here. Here you can find the Portuguese version for free. Write me for the italian version. The English version was published with the economic support of the PhD Scholarship of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Tactical Urbanism is a kind of urbanism that looks for solutions to problems with small interventions. In the same direction the practice of DIY Architecture tries to improve the change of behaviour of the people in a place, with projects that are often small and temporary. These two approaches’s fieldwork is the public space of cities, and are developed with the help of the inhabitants within the space. Sometimes these projects are directly realised by the designers and inhabitants themselves.

The word “tactical” and the expression “do it yourself” highlight that the distance between citizens, architects and the final project is shorter in these practices then what usually happens in the orthodox architectural practice. In fact these projects are always and clearly a product of a group of people, where a team is needed in the design, in establishing humans relations, and finally in the building process. DIY Architecture and Tactical Urbanism are two branches of the field in rapid evolution. They are used more and more in solving problems of North American and European contemporary cities. These two continents, with their contradictions, are the geographical borders of this study.

The speed of the transformation of cities is faster than the capability of interventions of orthodox Architecture and Urbanism. It’s because of this growing speed of transformation that these two approaches are becoming more common.

The operative dimension of the architect changes in these practices, he’s closer to people and to the project.