Streets to Social Space: A Tactical Approach to Suburban Placemaking
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Date
2019-06-18
Authors
Sund, Nicholas
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Abstract
As American cities transition from decades of automobile
dependency to walking, biking, and transit, new and
emerging forms of mobility such as ride-sharing, microvehicles,
and autonomous vehicles offer a new paradigm
of Transportation as a Service (TaaS) that has the potential
to drastically reduce the amount of space needed for
transportation and parking altogether—allowing streets
to become more than connectors between places, but
places in themselves.
However, suburban communities lack the necessary
funding to overhaul their sprawling transportation
infrastructure in the fashion imagined by today’s urban
planners and designers. Fortunately, the tradition of
Tactical Urbanism has already demonstrated how lowcost,
temporary interventions, such as parklets and
mobile food trucks, can adapt outdated infrastructure and
improve the usability of urban streets.
While Tactical Urbanism is now well documented and
even encouraged by municipal governments, its potential
to transform suburban streets remains unexplored
Following the decline of personal automobile ownership
in the suburbs, many forms of existing transportation
infrastructure, such as driveways, sidewalks, parking
strips, and roadways will either become obsolete, or
drastically change their functions. In either case, the need
to adapt this infrastructure can be effectively met by a
variety of existing and novel tactical interventions. To
that end, this project documents tactical interventions
in suburban communities and combines them into
conceptual design for a typical suburban street.
While tactical interventions can respond to unmet
social needs which have been overlooked by traditional
planning strategies, by demonstrating potential solutions
they also reveal new possibilities for urban and suburban
social space.
Description
62 pages. Examining committee chair: Michael Geffel
Keywords
tactical urbanism, suburbs, social space