From Temporary to Permanent: Strategy for Developing Public Spaces—Case of Bengaluru

Traditionally, planning and design have been limited to planners and engineers, leaving the voices of the public directly impacted by the design unheard. Cities today are undergoing unprecedented transformations, necessitating a rethinking of the approach to planning, and designing public spaces, and therefore have adopted unique practices such as participatory planning and tactical urbanism. The former is a method of designing liveable cities that is driven by active community participation where solutions are built with the help of local knowledge from the community, expert knowledge from professionals, and support from public authorities resulting in stronger outcomes whereas the latter is a temporary intervention using low-cost materials to catalyze long-term change. In Bengaluru, several placemaking projects were taken up using a data-driven approach, guided by tactical urbanism, and grounded in community participation to create better public places. Data collected through methods such as perception surveys, activity mapping, and interviews helped to strengthen the rationale for developing the interventions, tactical interventions helped in making crucial design decisions guided by temporary intervention and its impact, and public engagement helped create a functional design proposal through citizen interactions and build support for the project. The process was tested in three real-time projects; the first project was a “slow street project” which aimed to prioritize the safety of cyclists and pedestrians by introducing traffic calming measures; the second project was a street redevelopment project where pedestrian safety and the walking experience was prioritized through a series of measures including road dieting, and the third project revitalized an underutilized pocket in a densely populated residential area into an active community space. In all these cases, the importance and benefit of data-driven and participatory planning in shaping public space projects were gauged and, in a way, it also demonstrated that public support and stewardship demonstrate an alternate and emerging strategy for public placemaking. The outcome of these tactical urbanism projects led to formalizing a framework for undertaking tactical urbanism projects for public spaces using the three-prong strategy of test, observe and measure, and learn and modify. This research paper is an effort of the Directorate of Urban Land Transport, Government of Karnataka, to document and demonstrate the strategies used to develop and test public space designs on the ground driven by data, public engagement, and tactical urbanism, i.e., interventions that are short term, low cost, and scalable to catalyze long-term change, in a citizen-led format.