Chapter 5 ~ Everyday Urbanism


Everyday Urbanism grows out of both the community design movement and to a lesser extent the pop art movement. It is more about celebrating and intensifying existing, everyday conditions, such as public markets and street life, than overturning them and starting over with a different model.



It is ordinary, everyday life with little pretense of the possibility of building the ideal environment; a social product that is not determined by physical form but by the activities the occur in the city by the people who live there.

Public space is crucial for developing sense of time and culture; the use of space occurring via appropriation rather than by design, garage sales, side road venders; small, temporary, unintentional, nondescript, though often frequented spaces, next to unified, expensive, permanent, and grand public developments that resemble ghost towns.



From inner-city neighborhoods to street-corner mini-parks, idiosyncratic garden environments to middle-class trash alleys, vacant lots to sidewalks and front yards, temporary street performers to an auto-body repair lot that transforms into a drive-in restaurant during dinner hours, Everyday Urbanism is urbanism based on the reality of the city.

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