Tape and Tactical Urbanism
One of the reoccurring gags between the tremendous Looney Tunes duo of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner involves a painted line and the inexplicable collapse between representation and reality. In one shtick, Wile E. Coyote extends the painted lines of the desert highway to a solid canyon wall, where he paints a dark arch implying a tunnel’s passage. Moments later, Road Runner comes speeding along in a blur, presumably soon to crash into an immovable mountainside. But, of course, every attempt to best Road Runner ultimately fails, and when he races up the implied road to the rock wall, astonishingly, the Road Runner disappears into the painted scene. There are other versions of this trope where a real train comes out of a painted tunnel. Or another version, where the representation of a hole – a black circle – is moved from one place to another with the consequences of opening up the “real” ground below. In all cases, the painted line has surprisingly real consequences for the characters.
The amusement of the cartoon gags is set up by the unlikely agency given to the act of representation. The picture of a tunnel creates a passage for a locomotive to come barreling through or to divert the painted lines of the highway alters where traffic will go.
Today, new uses for roads are signified with little more than a painted line. A rattle can of temporary surveyors paint and a stencil of a pedestrian or cyclist are changing who gets to move where. Pop-up cycle lanes have been created with paint or removable tape. In my neighborhood, lines of paint, tape, and side-walk chalk are reorganizing the activities of the city: demarcating the requisite social distancing into the boutique on the first floor, creating a grid for the distancing of a practicing school marching band, and demarcating an orderly, distanced line of school-children.
Tape on seating to promote social distancing
All of these examples can be considered as a subset of tactical urbanism in the time of coronavirus - low-cost, temporary interventions to the built environment to improve local conditions. These actions with paint, chalk, and tape, highlights at least two aspects of our urban environment. First, though we might take the substance of the city as concrete – literally and figuratively, often immovable and enduring; it can also be flexible, open, and malleable to change. Second, of the ways the city is comprised, it is also through the behaviors of the people that inhabit it; it is a social reality built of behaviors. Change in the city can happen independently of ostensible changes of the city. These interventions of tape and tactical urbanism demonstrate how we can quickly redesign the city and enable it to be a more healthy and resilient environment.
Of note, a foundational guide for Tactical Urbanism, by Mike Lydon & Anthony Garcia, is subtitled “Short-term Action for Long-term Change.” Tactical urbanism is proposed as a strategy, in effect, functioning as the thin edge of a wedge to open up and create further opportunities. Small, temporary changes to the built environment catalyze transformations that become more enduring. Indeed, some of these temporary acts with tape and paint in response to the coronavirus are creating such opportunities for more lasting changes. For example, the U.K. transportation secretary has announced a £2 billion plan that supports transforming pop-up cycling and walking interventions during lockdown into permanent infrastructure and lasting changes. In New York, and Seattle, Paris, Milan, Berlin, and Bogota, there are also plans for temporary changes for pedestrians and cyclists to become permanent post-pandemic. I will be delighted to watch, like in Looney Tunes, the lines painted today having real consequences.
Sources:
Mike Lydon, and Anthony Garcia. Tactical Urbanism. 1st Ed. 2015. ed. Washington, DC: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, 2015.
Philip Oltermann, “Pop-up bike lanes help with coronavirus physical distancing in Germany,” The Guardian, published April 13, 2020.
Carlton Reid, “U.K. Government Boosts Bicycling And Walking With Ambitious £2 Billion Post-Pandemic Plan,” Forbes, May 9, 2020.
