Modeling Tactical Urbanism: A Contemporary Approach for Urban Regeneration

Abstract

Urban regeneration aims, among other objectives, to revive the city’s declined and sluggishly animated public spaces. Nevertheless, most of these projects target the city’s principal public spaces, such as central parks, squares, downtown, and waterfronts. Whether selectively, consecutively, or collectively carried out, the magnitude of these projects usually drains the city’s budget as they consume extended times, resulting in a few numbers being implemented in those primary spaces and fewer directed to the city’s secondary spaces. This paper focuses on developing a strategic multi-tiered framework to revive underutilized public spaces considering the time and cost layers. Such a framework builds on the employment of “local events” as a viably flexible and low-cost “Temporary Urbanism” tactic to revive poorly utilized city spaces of different grades. The research employs a qualitative and a desktop analysis approach to develop a framework to assist the city’s stakeholders in taking necessary and efficient actions to activate the city’s spaces as a parallel tool for traditionally used urban regeneration approaches.