The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism

by Gordon C C Douglas

Overview

When local governments neglect public services or community priorities, how do concerned citizens respond? In The Help-Yourself City, Gordon Douglas looks closely at people who take urban planning into their own hands with homemade signs and benches, guerrilla bike lanes and more. Douglas explores the frustration, creativity, and technical expertise behind these interventions, but also the position of privilege from which they often come. Presenting a needed analysis of this growing trend from vacant lots to city planning offices, The Help-Yourself City tells a street-level story of people's relationships to their urban surroundings and the individualization of democratic responsibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190691332
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	02/01/2018
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gordon Douglas is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at San José State University in California, where he is Director of the Institute for Metropolitan Studies. Born in England and raised in Northern California, he has also lived in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, and New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Constructive Deviance: What is DIY Urban Design? And What is it Not?
Chapter 3. Individualizing Civic Responsibility: DIY Urban Design in the Help-Yourself City
Chapter 4. "I'm an Expert on Public Space": Professional and Scholarly Knowledge at Work in DIY Urbanism
Chapter 5. The Spatial Reproduction of Inequality: Social Privilege and Disadvantage in Creative Transgression
Chapter 6. Pop-Up Planning: From Park(ing) Day to Parklet Dining, DIY Goes Official
Chapter 7. Conclusions
Appendix 1: Table of Projects
Appendix 2: Postface: Methods and Research Design
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Rising above mere ethnographic survey of 'do it yourself' urban projects-like guerrilla gardening or citizens' refashioning an urban space-Douglas inventories civic engagement full-on, including larger issues of social order and the costs and benefits of people taking pieces of the city into their own hands. Always thoughtful and without naiveté, he gives us a glimpse of pathways for urban reform and, more important, some manifestations of hope."
--Harvey Molotch, author of Against Security

"A book I have long been waiting for! Douglas explores the diverse ways in which people engage urban space and bring their ideas on to the streets themselves through site-specific planning efforts. The book shows us the broad range of urban knowledges present in any city neighborhood, but also the challenges of negotiating them in public space."
--Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions

"Do It Yourself urban design is an insubordinate, self-authorized, 'informal,' response to both the deficits of official planning and to the 'help yourself' regime of our old friend, neoliberalism. In this fascinating-and critical-reading, Douglas presents DIY as a progressive inversion of the broken windows theory of policing, rejecting control by coercive orderliness and seeking to cure deficits in the public realm by wanton acts of creative, corrective -if often privileged-addition."
--Michael Sorkin, author of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan

From the Publisher