Towards Adaptive Planning of Urban Spaces in the Context of a New Agile Urbanism

Abstract

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, regulative measures and the consequent change in behavioral patterns had a tremendous effect on the use of urban public spaces. The health crisis has emphasized the shortcomings of traditional urban bureaucracies in terms of their ability to react to a quickly changing satiation, while also demonstrating the potential of supporting change through temporary interventions. Experiments like pop-up bike lanes and additional space for gastronomy have shown the ability of municipalities to adapt to changing conditions. Although such short-term interventions can be performed quickly and with minimal costs, in a normal state of affairs municipalities typically struggle to open public spaces to such adaptive concepts. We argue that removing or adding space for certain uses will be an essential part of future urban planning, temporarily changing functions and infrastructural constellations to cope with ever changing environments. According to (Swilling, Social Dynamics 37:78–95, 2011), there are five different concepts of urbanism, describing different configurations of a city’s infrastructures. Ranging from the concept of car-oriented urbanism (splintered) to a more modern understanding of cities as ecosystems (green urbanism) and human-centered urban planning (livable urbanism), Swilling’s categorization shall be used to identify further aspects of a new concept we introduce as agile urbanism. Therefore, best practices from ongoing projects are taken into account to evaluate potential measures that are effective in establishing more flexible planning procedures. The considered projects comprise living labs and undertaken interventions in a variety of urban contexts. The research questions thereby are: How can municipal planning departments react to short-term changes in the urban flow of people? What kind of processes work in adapting urban space allocation? How can planning procedures be adjusted to cope with the fast-changing use of infrastructures? The application of tactical urbanism and the establishment of living labs are possible municipal instruments to support adaptive planning of urban space.