Memo #14: Who has the right to reallocated space?
Tips for designing with the needs and desires of diverse users at the core
By Mitchell Reardon & Emma Clayton Jones, Happy City
The City of Vancouver has created a series of Pop-up Plaza’s, like this one, supported by the Cambie Village BIA, to expand public space in addition to private patios. Photo credit: Mitchell Reardon
Municipalities around the world are rapidly adjusting policies to make it easy to reallocate main street space from parking or traffic to local business. This rapid, tactical approach is an important part of holistic pandemic recovery for main streets across Canada.
These decisions are hailed as triple bottom line solutions: supporting public health, economic recovery, and people’s desires to use outdoor space. But as municipalities move quickly to offer cafes, restaurants, bars — and in some cases, retailers and services — the space to sprawl onto sidewalks and streets, it raises important questions about the right to the city: What are the effects of expanding privatized space into the public realm? At whose cost does this allocation take place? And what priorities do these decisions communicate about aesthetics and activities that are acceptable and valuable in outdoor space?
Rarely is an urban planning decision good for all, and access to main street space has always been contested. At any given time, most streets host an ecosystem of stakeholders and uses: people commuting by car, on foot and by bike; those who shop and consume food and drinks; people who use the street to gather or to exercise; and homeless residents who sleep on the street, to name a few. Reallocating space on streets adds new conflicts to the power struggle. To plan a just recovery from COVID-19, street reallocations initiatives must meet the needs and desires of diverse users, particularly those who are low-income and marginalized.
Evidence of contested street space on one of Vancouver’s slow street routes. Photo credit: Mitchell Reardon
Tension in use of space
Tensions between main street users have cropped up as quickly as new outdoor patios. We’ll outline a number of them.
Here’s a revealing example, seen in a tension between restaurants and patios in Queen’s New York. A restaurant owner erupted in rage when a man was playing football with his son beside the owner’s new outdoor patio. He angrily told the New York Post: “they make me explode!”
“I say people are trying to eat dinner, can you play down the street or in the park? He say, ‘So what?!’ Looked at me like I’m nuts,” the store owner added. “They are supposed to have a cop here. There is no cop here.”
While opening street space to more uses is widely viewed as a lean, tactical approach, it also risks creating tensions where reallocated space for restaurants and bars displaces, and increases surveillance of racialized, homeless, and other street-involved people.
For example, imagine a curb or street space where low-income or homeless people had previously gathered to drink alcohol or use drugs being transformed into a private patio. While the space might still be used for drinking alcohol, it suddenly serves only more affluent users. Not only does this reallocation decision mean that low-income or homeless people cannot afford to drink on the patio, but it also might create the conditions to increase surveillance (from restaurant patrons, and in some cases security and police) on the street, further limiting homeless or other marginalized peoples' abilities to comfortably exist in the area. The power imbalances inherent within these tensions mean they are unlikely to be documented and as such, can be difficult to address.
Tensions have also emerged between businesses with conflicting priorities and approaches to attracting customers. In Pacific Grove, California, a widely-lauded initiative to allow restaurants to expand patios onto sidewalks and parking spaces was nixed just five days after rolling out. Despite the immediate success of the initiative for restaurant owners who attract customers on foot — one reports her sales immediately shot up by 200 per cent compared to the week before — it received strong pushback from retailers and service businesses worried about losing parking space for customers who drive.
Even within the food service industry, inequity is evident. This can be seen in tensions that arise when reallocation of streets displaces longstanding food vendors. In Manhattan, for example, a halal vendor is fighting with a hotel chain’s restaurants about who has the right to use a small piece of sidewalk. This video shows the conflict between the vendor, attempting to show up for work in the space he has used for 10 years, and the hotel personnel claiming the business now has the right to use the space.
Pacific Grove Public Works employees dismantle barriers one day after Council voted to close outdoor dining. Credit: Pam Marino / Monterey County Weekly
It’s messy. Now what?
While these decisions about reallocating streets are complex and easy to make too hastily, cities must take action to create people-friendly streets that support social, physical and economic recovery from COVID-19. Here are five essential considerations to ensure action is equitable:
1. Be careful with what you privatize
Once a business takes over a street space, the area goes from being part of the public domain toward being private, even if just temporarily. This can support business, but comes with two important caveats.
Parking spaces designated for people with disabilities should be completely off limits for reallocation. In fact, consider adding additional disability spaces to promote equitable access to the enhanced public realm. Improving bus stops could also be a way to ensure street reallocation is equitable. For example, Halifax is pioneering “stoplets” — expanded bus stops where people can comfortably relax while waiting — as a way to enhance public space and the transit experience.
Work with local businesses, the surrounding community and transportation planners to determine the extent of the reallocation. Completely removing cars may work well on some streets, like in Downtown Kelowna, but may present too many challenges on others.
A Pop-up Plaza next to an expanded restaurant patio off Granville Street in Vancouver. The co-located spaces increase the potential for lively outdoor gathering and enhance the sense of place, while ensuring community and business can thrive. Photo credit: Mitchell Reardon
2. Even when working fast, don’t take shortcuts on process
Because each street brings unique complexities, it is essential to ensure the reallocation design process considers the full range of user perspectives. Thoughtful co-creation doesn’t need to be time consuming. One of the strengths of tactical urbanism is creating interventions as “real-time renders” to test ideas. Engaging neighbours, visitors and people with diverse abilities, experiences and perspectives can occur directly on-site as people pass by. In a matter of hours, during construction or shortly after, key community insights can be used to enhance an intervention and adjust it to better meet the needs of those around it.
3. Expand public space, too
Just as there’s a strong economic argument for reallocating street and parking space for local businesses, there’s a clear public health case for transforming streets into spaces where people can move or linger, without a private vehicle. This could mean allocating space for public gatherings, programming by community groups, and more.
This double-pronged approach can support community and business in a symbiotic strategy that underlines that the success of main streets and surrounding communities is intertwined. It’s an approach that is invigorating patios and the public realm along Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver.
Recent Grade 11 graduates enjoying one of the City of North Vancouver’s open street activations. Photo credit: Mitchell Reardon
4. Measure what matters
Welcoming feedback from businesses and residents through online surveys will help take the pulse on ongoing shifts. Online surveying, however, tends to garner the strongest, loudest opinions. It also relies on respondent proactivity and internet connections, both of which privilege wealthier, and typically white submissions. This can make it harder to assess how most people using the sites actually feel about them.
On-site subjective wellbeing surveys offer a clearer understanding of how people feel while visiting the sites, whereas behaviour observation offers snapshots of the frequency of use, and what people are doing while they visit. While these approaches have limitations of their own, they help cities look beyond anecdotal hyperbole to better assess how — and by whom — space is being used, and whether it is fulfilling intended goals. And in cases where digital feedback is being solicited, consider on-site placards, encouraging people to share their feedback via phone numbers, QR codes and email addresses, to encourage a broader share of voices to get engaged.
5. Focus on impact, not kilometres converted
It can be tempting to throw up some barriers along an extended stretch of underused space and claim to have created a giant new public space. But if people aren't socializing, walking or playing on the street, what has really been accomplished? Public spaces don’t have to be big to be valuable. Just as private patios succeed when they create a sense of place, so too can small public spaces when they make people feel comfortable, connected and included.
A space initiated as part of the City of Vancouver’s Room to Queue initiative, local organizations and residents have established a shady pop-up plaza in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Photo credit: Mitchell Reardon
Making Space for People
In most cities, car-dominated streets take up nearly 30 per cent of total land. This use of the public realm far exceeds what is allocated for parks and public spaces. Creating more space for people in densifying, space-constrained cities is an important goal. Ensuring that this occurs in a way that supports public health and safety, as well as just pandemic recovery, is vital to the long-term wellbeing of our main streets, communities and cities.