Whose Everyday?

While Crawford's Everyday Urbanism can be packaged as an opposing alternative to the top-down tendencies of the New Urbanists, it seems that in their practical application, the so-called tactical methods she espouses yet again mobilize existing power structures rather than "de-privileging" urban design discourse and methods.

Is highlighting the improvised use of "leftover" space (the only space left for marginalized communities) anything more than the aestheticization of the provincial? The bourgeois are no doubt aspirational, preferring mostly to emulate those wealthier and more socially significant. But as seen in recent decades, there is an equally powerful tendency for the new bourgeois to occupy sanitized representations of the working class everyday. See Bushwick. See Carhartt. See Stanley Cups.

There is value in highlighting these tactical methods to reclaim space deconstructed through top-down policy. But should Margaret Crawford do that? What determines if a space is habitable or inhabitable? (Re-familiarized) What is familiar? Who is reading Crawford?

Everyday Urbanism galvanizes its debts to de Certeau, Lefebvre, and Debord. But in its application, it only pursues the comfortable and convenient.