How to: Improve a City

Amsterdam-based agency Pop-Up City specialises in urban planning with a difference. Change, they believe, is the only constant in cities across the world today.

So, since 2008, Pop-Up City has worked with governments, non-profits, and enterprises to create ‘future-proof’ places.

Pop-Up City helps to create strategies that help shape cities and developments to be liveable, authentic, sustainable… Crucially, Pop-Up City uses a mixture of branding, content creation and concept development to do what we especially believe to be key: storytelling.

Telling the stories of those cities and the communities around and within them. To not just retell and repeat history, but to spot trends and act on them to create more meaningful places that people are proud to call home.

If you think these all sound like ingredients for some glorious recipe then, well, you wouldn’t be far off. Pop-Up City has recently released The CityChangers Cookbook; a booklet created in collaboration with Urban Future, outlining 20 practical and concrete ideas that cities can adopt immediately, with little fuss, to promote positive urban change.

We caught up with Jeroen Beekmans to ask how we all can start improving our own urban environments, right here, right now.

1. Get makers involved

Makers are crucial in urban development.

The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace, and cities are no exception. New realities are constantly emerging that cities must adapt to.

It helps if you see the city less as a fixed structure and more as a living lab where ideas for better streets, squares, and parks are constantly being tested.

It can be very beneficial for a city to provide space for people with a maker’s mentality, who simply get on with it.

2. Evolve things that already exist

I’ll use three recipes from The CityChangers Cookbook as an example. Firstly, the ‘elephant paths’ on the Michigan State University campus.

Here, landscape architects left the design of the footpaths to the pedestrians themselves. As students walked across the grass from building to building, natural routes emerged, which were eventually paved.

A second recipe I like is the annual auditions for buskers, in a number of cities. The successful applicants receive a licence to perform in public spaces, such as the New York City subway stations.

It’s a win-win situation: public spaces become more enjoyable and it’s a breeding ground for musical talent.

The third recipe comes from my hometown, Amsterdam, where there’s a scheme that allows residents to request a small garden on their front wall.

The council creates the garden and then gives residents the responsibility to make something beautiful of it.

It’s been incredibly successful. Entire streets have been transformed. I have two front gardens myself, at home and at the office.

3. Get to the heart of the community

That can be challenging. I speak from experience, as we carry out many long-term placemaking projects in neighbourhoods across Amsterdam.

In many participatory processes, the process itself seems to be more important than the outcomes.

Residents are asked: “What would you like in your neighbourhood?” They come up with ideas, but then it stops there, because there’s no real ownership.

Ultimately, there are no outcomes and that leads to distrust among the population.

We ask residents a slightly different question: “What would you like to do?”

The first step in our projects is therefore to identify proactive residents who have been thinking about good ideas for a while but need a little push to get them going.

The chances of implementation are much higher, and successful projects inspire others.

4. Look everywhere for inspiration

We started as a blog about flexible urban development in 2008, which is why we always draw a lot of inspiration from outside the spatial planning field.

Chapter 4 of the big Pop-Up City book, which we published ten years ago, is titled: Can Cooks Become City-Makers?

What we meant by that was: a new food startup can have a bigger impact on a city’s future than all planners combined. I think that pretty well describes how we think about spatial development.

An example: we recently designed a temporary park for the Municipality of Amsterdam in an area that is still under development and has few residents.

We came up with a running route, the so-called ‘Half Mile of Amsterdam’, which is also a segment on Strava.

Combining physical and digital elements proved to be a success – numerous runners now know about the new park and compete with each other to be the fastest.

5. Build it and they will come

As you flip through The CityChangers Cookbook, you quickly realise that most of the recipes are ultimately about strengthening the community.

I think many of the recipes succeed in this because social interaction isn’t the goal in itself, but rather a side effect, and therefore much more genuine.

The movable tables and chairs you find everywhere on the streets of Prague are a great example of this: a clever idea that makes the city more inclusive and, as a result, more social.

6. Get creative with a city’s heritage

A city’s history definitely has an impact. In a city with a strong cycling culture, like Copenhagen or Amsterdam, organising Bike Buses to get children safely to school isn’t necessary.

But what we tried to achieve as much as possible with this booklet is to take ideas out of their context and explore whether they couldn’t also be easily copy-pasted into another city.

A project like the one with elephant paths as a starting point for public space design, which I just referred to, can be implemented anywhere. You just have to think of it. That’s the effect we wanted to achieve with this booklet. That’s why we use the term “recipe”.

7. Be genuine and authentic in your approach

I think that clinging to a set-in-stone city image is counterproductive to authenticity. I think that many new ideas and innovations can be very authentic too.

There’s an innovative, sustainable floating neighbourhood right around the corner from our office.

It’s a new development, but it’s driven by the Netherlands’ geographical location and the challenges that come with it – and, therefore, it’s authentic.

8. Collaboration is key

We’re always looking for new ideas for people to submit to Pop-Up City.

I noticed a lot of positive feedback on the Cookbook, so hopefully we’ll get the chance to create a sequel or expand the project in another way.

It would be great to have a public database with all sorts of simple, effective urban recipes that anyone can use.

Jeroen Beekmans is a Managing Partner of Pop-Up City, an Amsterdam-based agency of creative urban planners, researchers, and strategists who specialise in urban transformation to create cities that are future-proof and help shape the environment around them.

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