Biophilic Tactical Urbanism: Experiments Between Temporary Architecture And Multispecies Design
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Barnes, James
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Abstract
Tactical urbanism, the activation of public space through temporary interventions, has emerged as a common design strategy to promote longer-term positive shifts in the planning and formation of public spaces. The practice is typically positioned toward improving the human condition. This paper investigates how tactical urbanism might be expanded to a multispecies, “more-than-human” lens. How might tactical urbanism intersect with biodiversity in novel, scalable, and measurable ways to promote more sustainable, multispecies futures in the built environment? The term biophilic tactical urbanism is proposed as a design strategy and explored through 1:1 scale investigations and research experiments using a design science framework. This culminated in the development of a tactical urbanism system for plant ecologies: a low-cost, mobile, modular planter system for rapid deployment of biodiversity into new contexts. Five different design geometry/plant ecology concepts were developed, representing a range of biodiversity and programmatic opportunities. The intervention was deployed in the context of a public elementary school parking lot in the Mid-Atlantic US. This paper describes the results of this work on surrounding ecological systems, including invertebrates like bees and butterflies, as a metric of multispecies impact. Additionally, the intervention’s effect on urban heat were examined. Results indicate that temporary ecology can have a significant effect on the broader nature of public spaces, even at small spatial and temporal scales.
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Date
2025-03
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Text
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Proceedings
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