pop.up.planning is an attempt to bring together the phenomenon of Do It Yourself urbanism with the practice of city planning and the management of urban space. We have put together this site so that the DIY-er can better understand the tools and rules that shape our cities, suggest opportunities to work within that framework, and identify a way forward in which cities better respond to and facilitate the pop-up spirit. For the city planners in the room, we’ve also begun to document DIY efforts across the country and investigate how city officials are working with these individuals to improve the public realm.

The site is organized into three main themes: Planning Primer, DIY Urbanism, and Ways Forward. Click each of these directly, and you are taken to an overview of the theme. Click an entry from the theme’s dropdown menu, and you are taken to a specific section within it. We’re telling you this because we want to stress that it makes more sense if you read the thematic overviews first before proceeding to the more detailed sections within.

Planning Primer is an overview of the practice of city planning and municipal management of the built environment. The theme includes sections on zoning and land use controls, design regulations, building codes, and the surprisingly complex concept of ownership.

DIY Urbanism (On the Map) features an interactive Google map of many of the DIY projects featured on this site. It is by no means exhaustive (it focuses only on this continent, for one), but we hope it will grow to include more and more of what’s happening out there. You will also find within this theme discussions of what Maire learned from interviewing DIY-ers and city officials across North America, with individual profiles at DIY in Action and synthesized into Current Conditions, Lessons Learned, Benefits, and Challenges. But seriously – check out the map.

Ways Forward discusses various policy approaches that a city might take in order to allow and even empower the DIY ethos in the public realm. These are broadly categorized as Pilot, Policy Adaptation, and Property Rights. Lastly, we suggest a few ways that a city (or activists) might use Geographic Information Systems data available about their community to begin identifying sites that may be appropriate for DIY intervention.

Lastly, a caveat: Nothing on the site is intended to be wholly complete or comprehensive. New efforts are “popping up” all the time, and planning policies differ nearly everywhere you go. This is an introduction. Tell us what we’ve missed.

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Header photo: Los Angeles’ first Streets for People project: the Sunset Triangle Plaza. (Image courtesy Creative Commons license from Flickr user Alissa Walker.)