What is tactical urbanism?
Tactical Urbanism is all about action. Also known as DIY Urbanism, Planning-by-Doing, Urban Acupuncture, or Urban Prototyping, this approach refers to a city, organisational, and/or citizen-led approach to neighbourhood building using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions to catalyse long-term change. In other words, a tactical urbanism approach allows communities to test changes to the street scape with temporary installations before expensive, permanent changes are made.
The Sandringham community has expressed for a long time the need for green areas, safer streets and walkways, and spaces to sit and enjoy our village. SPiCE has decided to use tactical urbanism as a way to explore how we can do this. By trialling short term solutions, such as temporary green spaces, temporary art work, or temporary zebra crossings, we can evaluate a solution, before making it permanent!
SPiCE has decided to collaborate with NZ based tactical urbanism experts, Place Creative, to initiate and trial various projects, and to take action to our streets!
The Sandringham community has expressed for a long time the need for green areas, safer streets and walkways, and spaces to sit and enjoy our village. SPiCE has decided to use tactical urbanism as a way to explore how we can do this. By trialling short term solutions, such as temporary green spaces, temporary art work, or temporary zebra crossings, we can evaluate a solution, before making it permanent!
SPiCE has decided to collaborate with NZ based tactical urbanism experts, Place Creative, to initiate and trial various projects, and to take action to our streets!
Urban Graffiti place-making on our sidewalks to celebrate Holi, the Hindi Festival of Colours! (March 2022)
TACTICAL URBANISM & SAFER STREETS
SPiCE's most recent project, in collaboration with Place Creative, is a project to make our streets safer. We want to collect citizen science data, to determine how we can make the necessary, community led changes to our village.
The first step in our 'Safer Streets' project is to data collection. Through citizen led science, we will be collecting information on how safe our streets are currently. We are asking you, our community members, to fill out our Traffic Report Form, and count the number of unsafe incidents (illegal u-turns, jay-walking etc) you see in a 15 minute window in Sandringham Village.
The next step will be collating this data and presenting it to Auckland Transport. It can then be analysed to understand where and what changes could be made within the village to make our streets safer! These changes would then be trialled temporarily. For example, instead of installing a permanent concrete barrier for a bike lane, we would use temporary traffic cones for a short term trial.
In this way we can be sure that the change is going to work for our community before it's made permanent!
The first step in our 'Safer Streets' project is to data collection. Through citizen led science, we will be collecting information on how safe our streets are currently. We are asking you, our community members, to fill out our Traffic Report Form, and count the number of unsafe incidents (illegal u-turns, jay-walking etc) you see in a 15 minute window in Sandringham Village.
The next step will be collating this data and presenting it to Auckland Transport. It can then be analysed to understand where and what changes could be made within the village to make our streets safer! These changes would then be trialled temporarily. For example, instead of installing a permanent concrete barrier for a bike lane, we would use temporary traffic cones for a short term trial.
In this way we can be sure that the change is going to work for our community before it's made permanent!
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
To enable us to collect the data to make these changes, we have created a Traffic Report Form, which you can download and print.
How to fill out your form
How to hand your form in
Once you have completed your form, email to to angela@spice.org.nz
- Find a safe place on Sandringham Rd to stand for 10-15 minutes
- Count the number of 'incidents' you witness on the streets and walkways (the types of 'incidents' are set out on the form)
- Record the incidents you see on the form
- Hand your form in to us so we can count the results!
How to hand your form in
Once you have completed your form, email to to angela@spice.org.nz
We would love to for you to share your results, and any photos on our Facebook Page or on Instagram using the hashtags #asafersandringham and #callingAT - hopefully with your help we can collect enough data to present to AT and call on them to take action to help us make a safer Sandringham.
If this interests you, we would love to hear from you! We are always seeking enthusiastic community members to step up and help us with projects like this.
If this interests you, we would love to hear from you! We are always seeking enthusiastic community members to step up and help us with projects like this.
