Tactical Urbanism: An Introduction

Designer and doer Mike Lydon, CNU-A, has one mission: Improving the livability of our towns and cities starting at the street, block, or building scale. In this first course of a two course series, Lydon introduces Tactical Urbanism. Sometimes sanctioned, sometimes not, these "tactical" actions are commonly referred to as: "guerrilla urbanism," "pop-up urbanism," "city repair," or "D.I.Y. urbanism." Tactical Urbanism embraces all of these actions with an approach that features these five characteristics: phased instigation, meeting local planning challenges, realistic and short term, low risk-high gain, and stakeholder capacity-building. In this course, the drivers of local urbanism and the need for a strategy and tactics approach is analyzed. Certain necessary conditions — where tactical urbanism is most likely to succeed and where not — are answered as are clarifying definitions. Key case studies are presented to explain the movement. The course includes instruction for tactical place-making, traffic calming and re-design, pop-up commerce incubation and more!