What Everyday Urbanism is not?

“Everyday Urbanism” by Margaret Crawford, John Chase and John Kaliski in 1999, builds on the concept of adaptive regular life and reality in a city.  It doesn’t envision a perfect urban environment, rather it reconnoiters ways to improve what already exists in day to day ways. It views the city as a dialog between and among its residents. This leads to a dynamic urban form that evolves not from outside pressures or plans dropped from above, but from activities that occur within a neighborhood. I really like how the authors explained this everyday urbanism in means of daily life examples considering the city’s economic, political and social preferences.

I believe by mean “Urban design or planning” we, designers should try to design considering the existing pattern or analyzing the types of urban fabrics that the city is endeavoring itself and only thus can find a solution. Because vibrancy cannot be planned in a board room or on a piece of paper, it needs to develop on the street level through regular ‘everyday’ interactions. What we can do, is to encourage only. 

Unless it’s a SimCity game, even though it’s just a computer game, Cities - Skylines has a lot to teach us about the unstated premises of our urban planning conversations. It establishes how those premises intensely shape what our cities should look like. 

We miss what urban planning debates should be when we assume the necessity of a given way of regulating cities, assume away the messiness of people and their relationships, assume away politics, and ignore major costs.