In 2008, former transportation engineer Chuck Marohn founded the Strong Towns organization as an effort to make American cities more walk/bike/transit -friendly and fiscally sound. Nowadays, our city has a local branch of the movement, Strong Towns Chicago.
As part of several events the group is hosting or promoting this month, this week they held an online Tactical Urbanism Visioning Session, led by "tactical urbanism lead" Eddie Lehwald. "This is an open invite for anyone to brainstorm ways to make their neighborhoods safer, more pedestrian-friendly, and overall more inviting," the invite stated.
Lehwald introduced the topic by saying he thinks bus benches are a great place to start with tactical urbanism visioning because they're straightforward and address a clear need. Why not choose a more unusual, potentially controversial, project to install inexpensive, temporary changes to the built environment? "There can be a certain value in a little pushback, but I think I'm not really interested in it being the goal," he said. "I like the idea of doing something that looks like it's just supposed to be there."
"Speaking specifically about a bench, I take the bus all the time, and where I pick it up at Sacramento," Lehwald added. "You're just on a busy corner with a trash can and a gas station. It's an awful place to wait, and [a bench] just adds that little bit of dignity."
Caleb Schemmel, who has a background in architecture, designed the benches by doing a pricing exercise to determine what's relatively straightforward to build with relatively simple cuts and also somewhat resilient. He said that the design he created might be somewhat larger than necessary for that location, but it would be easy to make and quick to deploy.
"But the overall exercise of this was, if we want to do something custom, where we feel that there's a way to show a community or kind of highlight a specific trait, we have that capacity too," Schemmel added. "[It would be] relatively simple... I got the total price down to 60-ish dollars. And building three of these would be relatively easy, maybe five or six hours to do all the setups and everything."
The next steps for Strong Town Chicago would be to develop a parts list and price sheet, which Schemmel already has a start on. They believe three park benches are a reasonable number to try to build, though that number is not set in stone. Attendee Alex Montero suggested that they drop the benches in different parts of the city since there are spots all over town that need them.
That's a type of guerrilla urbanism that lots of Chicagoans, not just urbanists, could probably get behind.
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