Urban Acupuncture

Urban Acupuncture: Revivifying Our Cities Through

Targeted Renewal

Cities throughout the world, irrespective of their age, location,

and economic vitality, are faced with a number of essential
problems which are arguably endemic to the very concept of
urbanization.
From the provision of clean water and sanitation, to the
availability of cost-effective and efficient transportation,
many of these problems correlate rather predictably with
population density.
Some problems, however, prove far more abstract in both their
causes and effects, as is the case with urban decay.
Perhaps even more elusive is a reliable solution to such
problems that is economically, ethically, and environmentally
sound. A handful of progressive urban renewalists,
however, have developed an adaptable framework which
they believe may finally provide the answer.
While it is not immediately clear who first coined the term urban
acupuncture, there does seem to be a broad consensus on its
basic tenets.

First, proponents argue that urban revitalization must begin at

the hyperlocal level. Borrowing from the concepts of
acupuncture, they advocate a targeted (small-scale)
approach to healing the (large-scale) malady of urban
decay.

They argue that large - scale revitalization projects are not only
less effective, but they are increasingly less feasible, as
municipal budgets tighten. Moreover, such projects fail to
meaningfully involve their surrounding communities in their
planning and development, effectively discouraging long - term
local stewardship. Above all, however, proponents suggest
that cities must be treated as living organisms, requiring
solutions as dynamic as life itself.
What is the Pedibus The major difficulty in using the pedestrian urban space made
necessary to define some interventions for the benefit of the whole neighborhood.
The preliminary surveys immediately clarified the need for a project able to
reclaim the physical space of the city through the definition of new
safety standards.

The project proposed to establish an intervention strategy for the realization

of school routes along the pedestrian pathways reorganized according to
the idea of Pedibus.

The lack of pedestrian security requires parents to take up to four trips

to accompany children to school in their cars. Paradoxically, the safety
of some restricts that of others and increases traffic and air pollution.

In Switzerland, France and Canada an alternative to use of cars to go to

school is provided by the Pedibus, a sort of pedestrian school bus.

The name Pedibus is derived from Latin pes, pedis (foot) and bus. Inspired
by the Human Powered Transports (transport systems in human potential)
provides an incentive to avoid the use of cars and motorbikes in the city.
It is organized just like a city bus with terminals, fixed routes, stops
and running times. If one child is helpless, the union of many children
gives strength and visibility.
Gordon Matta-Clark
(June 22, 1943 August 27, 1978)

Highly influential in the contemporary discourse of

urban acupuncture, he was an American artist with
an architecture background who transformed
abandoned buildings into site-specific art
installations.
He is credited with developing a system for
identifying pockets of disrepair in the built
environmentthe first step in the framework of urban
acupuncture.
Marco Casagrande (born May 7, 1971)

A prominent Finnish architect, environmental artist,

and social theorist, is perhaps the first to systematize
the concepts of urban acupuncture. Indeed, the core
principles of UA are integral to his theory and practice,
and his resultant work can be seen in the built
environments of Taipei and Montreal.
Casagrande described urban acupuncture as:

cross-over architectural manipulation of the

collective sensuous intellect of a city. City is
viewed as multi-dimensional sensitive energy-
organism, a living environment. Urban
acupuncture aims into a touch with this nature.
Casagrande's 34 meter-long woven bamboo structure, named "Cicada," sits
in a open green field, hemmed in by roads and an elevated train track. Yet,
it's able to create its own ground by the delineation of crushed stone and
concrete carefully placed all around the organically-shaped form. Over time,
the structure is designed to be covered with green creeping plants.
Crossing the threshold, it's almost like entering the mouth of a large animal
and into another world, where it's softly lit and the bamboo weave filters out
the sight of cars and concrete.
In the belly of this bamboo whale is a fire pit, surrounded by stools and
bordered on one side with stacked wood to burn. Above, there's a ventilation
hole that provides a rounded view of the sky.
By bringing to bear local
building traditions, spaces
are given an identity that
is locally relevant.
Says Casagrande:
As one enters the Cicada,
the surrounding city
disappears. The cocoon
is an interior space but
totally outside it is
breathing, vibrating, soft
and safe. The space will
swallow the modern man
and will offer him a
possibility to travel a
thousand years back in
order to realize, that the
things are the same.
Maybe it's not as exciting as bigger urban renewal projects, but "Cicada"
nevertheless presents something beautiful, successful and unexpected in a
gritty context, without the cost, huff and fuss of larger proposals. Rather than
the one mega-project, perhaps scores of small-scale, less costly and
localized projects of "urban acupuncture" such as this is what our cities need
in order to recover and renew themselves.
While his definition may be abstract, the results
of his work are very real, garnering
considerable attention from the architecture
community.

He developed his theory in Taipei after attending

the Urban Flashes symposium before being invited
back by the Taipei City Government to study the
human / organic layer of the city and how to
react to it by means of urban planning.
The focus was an illegal settlement, an urban
farming community enclave inside the modern
city named Treasure Hill.
Marco Casagrande noticed this area was full of
human energy that was being destroyed by the
government. He states that the energy had been
turned negative and had to be redirected
positively towards construction,
like turning over the compost that has been
the smelly part of the farm just to become the
most fertile top soil. I was careful to manipulate
these hidden energy flows and the small
elements that I introduced to Treasure Hill can be
compared to the needles in acupuncture.
Nicholas de Monchaux
(born March 14, 1973)

Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban

Design at UC Berkeley, de Monchaux is a
prominent advocate for urban acupuncture in
the United States.
His Local Code project is not only
technologically remarkable, but it provides an
evocative glimpse into the potential of the UA
framework.
While its easy to receive concepts like urban
acupuncture with skepticism, one can scarcely reject
the logic of its goals and methodology.

The sheer breadth of support for the principles of UA

are also reassuring, indicating a coordinated effort to
seek new solutions to the problem of urban decay.
Although urban revitalization is inherently a gradual
process, we will perhaps see an increasing number of
UA projects coming to fruition in the next few
years.

Hopefully, these efforts will prove not only

aesthetically pleasing, but serve to categorically
improve the health of urban communities.
URBAN ACUPUNCTURE: MANUEL DE SOLA-MORALES

Architecture and Urban Design are not extensions

of each other, they merge seamlessly.

Maunuel de Sol-Morales work is not driven by

planning or the art of city building, it is instead the
concept of stimulating urbanism, through
minimum interventions achieving the maximum
effect.

Hans Ibelings writes on urbanity, the work of de Sol-

Morales consists to a large extent of interventions at
points where there is little energy, if any at all.
His interventions unleash a heightened potential: the
possibility of urbanity.

Urban Acupuncture to de Sol-Morales is built upon

this underlying principle.

He believes the essence of urbanity lies in the

balance of urban mixity and density, between
building and activity. Approaching the sites with an
attentive and cautious approach to the richness of the
sites, both the existing richness and most importantly,
the potential richness.

De Sol-Morales writes that he works on the skin on

cities, that the architecture of surface texture is the
raw material of his urban projects.
It is this skin that is experienced, urbanity made of
touch and vision, of sensations and suggestions.

It is the urban matter that transmits to us, at its

most sensitive points and neutral zones, the
qualitative energy that accumulates collective
character on certain spaces, charging them with
complex significance and cultural references and
making them semantic material, social
constructions of intersubjective memory.

The power that is held within the skin of the city is

overwhelming. The art of Urban Acupuncture is the
manipulation of this skin.
As with acupuncture as a medical application de Sol-
Morales states that the location of the sensitive
point is the first step in the strategic treatment of the
urban skin.

To identify the sensitive point, the skin of the city

has to be observed with the attention of a
detective who scrutinises the tinniest clues in it
wrinkles and their apparent lack of connection.

It is only after this in-depth scruitinisation has been

undertaken can the intervention be conceived
considering, adding, removing, modifying or the
restructuring of things. Surprise and intuition are as
important in the urban project as coherence and
understanding.
Jaime Lerner (born December 17, 1937)

Rather uniquely among architects and urban

planners, Lerner was also an accomplished politician. As
mayor of Curitiba, the largest and wealthiest city in southern
Brazil, Lerner instituted a number of social reforms resulting
in improved public health and a more vibrant economy. His
efforts were heavily inspired by the concepts of urban
acupuncture, as he described in 2007:
I believe that some medicinal magic can and should be
applied to cities, as many are sick and some nearly terminal. As
with the medicine needed in the interaction between doctor
and patient, in urban planning it is also necessary to make the
city react; to poke an area in such a way that it is able to help
heal, improve, and create positive chain reactions. It is
indispensable in revitalizing interventions to make the organism
work in a different way.
Jaime Lerner holds the ethos that the city is not a
problem it is a solution. More and more I am
convinced that not only a solution for a country but
also for the problem of climate change. We have a
very pessimistic view of the city, with the attitude that
the city is too big with the resources to be improved
quickly.

Lerner believes that the city can be improved in less

than three years, not a question of scale or financial
resources, every problem in the city has to have its
own equation of core responsibility and also a design.
Citing, creativity starts when you cut a zero from
your budget.
The two prominent features of Jaime Lerners theory
of Urban Acupuncture are mobility and education.
Through educating the children they will have a
strong understanding of sustainability, they then
may have an influence on changing their parents
perceptions also.
Lerner has created characters to educate the younger
generation of his ideas, assigning a character to an
everyday object. Using the turtle as an example of
the best way of life, he says, the turtle is the best
example of living and working together.
In contrast much of the way the modern city works is
dislocated. People live in one district, or outside of the
city, work in another and use another for leisure
activities.
Another character Lerner has created, Otto the
automobile, to which he assigns the characteristic
that, the car is like the guest who is invited to a
party and never wants to leave, greedy,
exhausting all the food and drink and always
asking for more.

The automobile is often used to connect the dislocated

entities of the city, exhausting the planets natural
resources and demanding improved infrastructure.

Public transport on the other hand, transports many

people with the minimal input of energy, improving
mobility and sustainability.
When talking of the cities design Lerner
believes that every city has its own design,
and to make change happen quickly you have
to propose a scenario for the city, state and
the country.

A design that will appeal to the large majority,

who will respond and help to make it happen.

The design has to focus beyond the building

and materials used, instead the design is of
the concept of the city and educating
society.
YIN + YANG
The yin and yang of planet earth could be conceived as the
opposite natures of city and countryside; the pairing could not
co-exist without each other.
Urban acupuncture is an urban environmentalism theory
which combines urban design with traditional Chinese medical
theory of acupuncture. This process uses small-scale
interventions to transform the larger urban context.
Sites are selected through an aggregate analysis of social,
economic, and ecological factors, and developed through a
dialogue between designers and the community.
Acupuncture relieves stress in the body, urban acupuncture
relieves stress in the environment. Urban acupuncture
produces small-scale but socially catalytic interventions into the
urban fabric.

This strategy views cities as living, breathing organisms and

pinpoints areas in need of repair. Sustainable projects, then,
serve as needles that revitalize the whole by healing the parts.
By perceiving the city as a living creature, thoroughly
intertwined, urban acupuncture promotes communitarian
machinery and sets localized nucleus similar to the human
bodys meridians.
Originally coined by Barcelonan architect and urbanist,
Manuel de Sola Morales, the term has been recently
championed and developed further by Finnish architect
and social theorist Marco Casagrande, this school of
thought eschews massive urban renewal projects in
favour a of more localised and community approach
that, in an era of constrained budgets and limited
resources, could democratically and cheaply offer a
respite to urban dwellers.
Casagrande views cities as complex energy organisms in
which different overlapping layers of energy flows are
determining the actions of the citizens as well as the
development of the city. By mixing environmentalism
and urban design Casagrande is developing methods of
punctual manipulation of the urban energy flows in
order to create an ecologically sustainable urban
development towards the so-called 3rd Generation
City (postindustrial city).
Casagrande describes urban acupuncture as:
cross-over architectural manipulation of the collective
sensuous intellect of a city. City is viewed as multi-
dimensional sensitive energy-organism, a living
environment. Urban acupuncture aims into a touch
with this nature, and Sensitivity to understand the
energy flows of the collective chi beneath the
visual city and reacting on the hot-spots of this
chi.
Architecture is in the position to produce the
acupuncture needles for the urban chi. and A weed
will root into the smallest crack in the asphalt and
eventually break the city. Urban acupuncture is the
weed and the acupuncture point is the crack. The
possibility of the impact is total, connecting human
nature as part of nature.
Casagrande utilized the tenets of acupuncture:

treat the points of blockage and let relief

ripple throughout the body.
More immediate and sensitive to community
needs than traditional institutional forms of large
scale urban renewal interventions would not
only respond to localized needs, but do so with
a knowledge of how city-wide systems operated
and converged at that single node. Release
pressure at strategic points, release
pressure for the whole city.
The theory of urban acupuncture opens the door for
uncontrolled creativity and freedom.
Each citizen is enabled to join the creative
participatory planning process, feel free to use city
space for any purpose and develop his environment
according to his will.
This new post-industrialized city Casagrande dubs
the 3rd Generation City, characterized by its sensitive
citizens who feel the calling of a sustainable co-
operation with the rest of the nature, sensitive citizen
who are aware of the destruction that the insensitive
modem machine is causing to nature including human
nature.
In a larger context a site of urban acupuncture can be
viewed as communicating to the city outside like a
natural sign of life in a city programmed to subsume it.
Third Generation City

First generation city was the human

settlement in straight connection with nature
and dependent on nature.

The fertile and rich Taipei basing provided a

fruitful environment for such a settlement.

The rivers were full of fish and good for

transportation and the mountains protected the
farmed plains from the straightest hits of the
frequent typhoons.
The second generation city is the industrial
city. Industrialism claimed the citizens
independence from nature a mechanical
environment could provide human everything
needed.

Nature was seen as something un - necessary

or as something hostile it was walled away
from the mechanical reality.
Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the
industrial city.
The community gardens of Taipei are
fragments of the third generation urbanism
when they exist together with the industrial
surroundings.
Local Knowledge is present in the city and this
is where Ruin Academy focuses its research.
Among the urban gardeners are the local
knowledge professors of Taipei.
Third Generation City is true when the city
recognizes its local knowledge and allows
itself to be part of nature.
Urban acupuncture focuses on local resources rather
than capital - intensive municipal programs and
promotes the idea of citizens installing and caring
for interventions. These small changes, proponents
claim, will boost community morale and catalyze
revitalization.
Boiled down to a simple statement, urban
acupuncture means focusing on small, subtle,
bottom-up interventions that harness and direct
community energy in positive ways to heal urban
blight and improve the cityscape.
It is meant as an alternative to large, top-down,
mega-interventions that typically require heavy
investments of municipal funds (which many cities at
the moment simply dont have) and the navigation
of yards of bureaucratic red tape. The micro-scale
interventions targeted by urban acupuncture appeal
to both citizen-activists and cash-strapped
communities.
Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba,
suggests urban acupuncture as the future
solution for contemporary urban issues; by
focusing on very narrow pressure points in
cities, we [who?] can initiate positive ripple
effects for the greater society.

Urban acupuncture reclaims the ownership of

land to the public and emphasizes the
importance of community development through
small interventions in design of cities. It involves
pinpointed interventions that can be
accomplished quickly to release energy and
create a positive ripple effect.
Taiwanese architect and academic Ti-Nan Chi
is looking with micro urbanism at the vulnerable
and insignificant side of contemporary cities
around the world identified as micro-zones,
points for recovery in which micro-projects have
been carefully proposed to involve the public on
different levels, aiming to resolve conflicts
among property owners, villagers, and the
general public.
A loosely affiliated team of architects Wang Shu, Marco
Casagrande, Hsieh Ying-chun and Roan Ching-yueh
(sometimes called WEAK! Architecture) are describing the
unofficial Instant City, or Instant Taipei, as architecture that
uses the Official City as a growing platform and energy
source, where to attach itself like a parasite and from where to
leach the electricity and water
[The Instant City's] illegal urban farms or night markets is so
widespread and deep rooted in the Taiwanese culture and
cityscape that we could almost speak of another city on top of
the official Taipei, a parallel city or a para-city.

WEAK! is calling urban acupuncture depending on the

context as Illegal Architecture, Orchid Architecture, the
Peoples Architecture, or Weak Architecture.

The theory of urban acupuncture suggests that scores of

small-scale, less costly and localized projects is what cities
need in order to recover and renew themselves.
BIOURBAN ACUPUNCTURE
Review by Angelo Abbate
Marco Casagrande, Biourban Acupuncture.
Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena
Science fiction has always confronted artificial and
natural reality. Most of it has envisioned a future that is
going to corner and minimize nature, echoing social
and philosophical treatises, art, and a diffuse anxiety
about mature capitalism, with visions of inhuman
cities, robots-like men, and life downgraded to slavery
by an impersonal power system.
Perhaps that is not just fiction anymore, the leap
into a paradoxical parallel-world having happened
already, and we unknowingly living in it living into the
second generation cities, as Marco Casagrande
says.
These cities are ruled by intangible, unreal,
and not-human purposes, and grow by
systematically destroying those natural
geometric patterns and sub-codes that scholars
like Christopher Alexander, Nikos Salingaros,
Stephen Kellert, and others working in the fields
of Evidence Based Design and Biourbanism,
are pointing out.
As human beings seem to be educated to
feed destruction, exploitation, pollution, and
waste of their own habitat, they are
dehumanizing themselves.
The metropolis of Taipei, as many Italian dull suburbs,
is no exception to this trend. The ones who live and
work in accordance with life, such as urban
nomads or indigenous communities, are a threat
to the system. It wants to save them from
themselves, checking and adjusting their activities.
Marco Casagrande offers a way out, a therapy for the
sickness of our cities, a path to achieve what he calls
the Third Generation City.
Cities, to be the fall of the machine, where the ruin is
the reality produced by nature, that reclaims the
artefact. Cities where the nature force takes the
initiative, affects the design of industrial society,
and becomes co- architect.
The treatment is described by Casagrande as
biourban acupuncture, reviving the traditional
Chinese medicine practice on city scale, in order to
trigger purifying and healing processes in the
urban organism.
Marco mentions several needles of Biourbanism.
All of them aim at establishing a contact between the
urban collective consciousness and the vital
systems of nature.
Illegal community gardens in Taipei, and weed
growing from cracks in the concrete, are examples
of similar needles. Nature can restore wholeness from
a single point or node even the wholeness of our
human condition.
Ruin Academy is an organic void on the
industrial tissue of the mechanical urbanism.
It is a hole penetrating through the man-made
layers of asphalt and concrete and finally
reaching the original soil.
Through this hole, a crack in the city, local
knowledge can surface. There are many holes
in Taipei performing urban acupuncture to the
city.
In the alley of Ruin Academy there is
a tree growing from the wall of a 5 - story apartment
building.
This is a big and heavy tree that has spread its roots
on a wide surface on the wall and it has penetrated
through the wall in order to lock itself to the primary
structures of the building.
Its roots are further penetrating into the sewage
system of the house and it uses the human
circulation as its energy and water supply.
This tree has chosen the man-made structure to be
its living environment. It has balanced its growth not
to break the building. It is an urban bonsai regulating
itself according to the given conditions.
Architectural control must be broken in
order to let nature to step in.
Industrial city must be ruined through punctual
interventions.
The valueless void of the current urban
development will be filled with ethics the
corners are windy.
Urban Bioacupuncture is ecological
restoration of existing cities through focus
on cracks, holes and organic knowledge.
Dictatorship of Sensitivity.
The community gardens and urban farms of Taipei are
holes in the city.
These holes are sucking in ad-hoc community
activities to take place.
Random holes are popping up here and there in
Taipei.
Some last for only a couple of hours, some keep
going on for decades like the 101 Garden.
Hole in the city is un-official and it is maintained by
organic power balancing.
Temples are religious holes.
Night markets and urban nomad activities are holes.
The illegal city that keeps Taipei alive is urbanism of
holes dancing on top of the official fiction.
University needs holes.
The university has grown weaker the same time
as the different disciplines have grown stronger.
The academia should focus on the holes, not
on the disciplines.
Compost is dead without holes.
When holes are introduced the compost will
become the most fertile top-soil.
Same with architecture, city and university.
A weed will root in the smallest crack in asphalt and eventually
break the city.
Why does the nature want to break the city?
City is an obstacle in the life providing system of nature
and it wants to tune it to be part of itself.
It wants city to produce life resonating with the rest of nature.
In urban acupuncture, an area is regarded as a
complex organism of energy in which different
'energy layers' overlap with each other and
influence residents behavior and conduct and
how an urban area develops.

Urban acupuncture is a point by point

manipulation of the urban energy to create a
sustainable town or city, which Marco
Casagrande has dubbed '3rd Generation
Cities'.
UA has no fixed scale. Acupunks practice
micro interventions like the Human Layer
projects in various European cities, but they may
also come to Puerto Rico and rethink an entire
infrastructure, aiming to render the city liveable
for pedestrians, and not the car traffic alone
Casagrande claims to have discovered UA
essentially, a method where humans are seen as
part of nature when he recognized the city as
an enemy.
I am addicted to the city, but its a place
where people get corrupted, where they
blindfold themselves and live in constant
hypnotization.
You can fly your kite, or drive a scooter, but you dont
look inside yourself because this is called paranoia. Its a
climate that creates pollution and prostitution, so of course
I was interested: it was like going to a whorehouse.
But the city is also the ultimate place where people meet,
and the collective conscious is cooking up here. I wanted
to deal with this mass of organic collective energy, so the
city became by target and UA my too.
Its the strategy of a bird that shits over a city, and its
shit contains a seed, and this fertilized seed goes down,
and cracks the asphalt, and this organic thing starts
growing. I needed to penetrate through the industrial
surface in order to reach that what everyone sees and
feels but the official system cannot deal with.
At first I believed to be alone, but there were other
people thinking along the same lines. The biggest step
forward was when I found out that normal, real citizens
were breaking the official city all the time.
Casagrande esteems favelas and slums as high-potential
acupuncture points.

Industrialism and any other kind of human control introduces

rigidity and, like with anything else in nature, rigidity means
death.

Flexibility, mobility, softness, weakness have a sense of

life to them, so the problem itself may contain a better
solution than the attempt at total control.

Their social science fiction deals exclusively with problems that

have no satisfactory solution on the material plane. They pose
the kind of question where every answer is strictly personal,
one - off, and valid only if you find it deep inside yourself.
Problem-solving is different from improvising. Casagrande opts
for improvisation.
Illegal community garden in the central Taipei.
Urban acupuncture is turning the urban compost to fruitful top-soil.
 What is urban acupuncture?
How can urban acupuncture be applied to a city?
Why?

1.

Urban acupuncture aims into a touch with the collective psyche of the
city. The collective psyche is reflected through collective conscious
which is striving towards the absolute, the real reality.
The theory of the urban acupuncture celebrates the possibility of a
light-weight touch with a total impact. Total is a fragment of the
absolute. Through urban acupuncture the absolute finds a way to
reflect in the city.
Urban acupuncture is ruining the industrial surface of the built
human environment. Ruin is when man-made has become part of
nature. A weed will root into the smallest crack in the asphalt and
eventually break the city.
Urban acupuncture is the weed and the acupuncture point is the
crack. The possibility of the impact is total, connecting human nature
as part of nature.
As the city reflects control and strenght the urban
acupuncture has to be weak in order to break the machine.

In its direction towards the truth the weak architecture and weak
art is the sister of theology and philosophy, but faster: weak art
meets the absolute immediately; it is free from the philosophical
discussion or the theological belief.

Weak architecture is art. Art dont need to believe and

dont need to discuss - it can not help being itself. There is
no excuse for art, art reflects the absolute.

The collective mind generates the social drama that keeps

the city alive. People are ruining their build human
environment by being themselves.
The third generation city is the ruin of the industrial city.
The third generation city is part of nature. Urban
acupuncture is aiming to the third generation city.
2.

Urban acupuncture can be applied to an

existing city through art.
The true environmental art in the urban context
is urban acupuncture.
Architecture is environmental art.
Urban planning is the process of ruining the
city.
Weak artist and weak architect is a design-
shaman interpreting what the bigger shared
mind is transmitting.
3.
The complexities of the city are either working to
support life or against nature.

The idea of the industrial city is to be autonomous

from nature. This autonomity is the source of pollution.
Pollution is real, it is part of nature - city is not
real.
What is real is valuable: what is not real is not
valuable. Urban acupuncture connects the public to
the real reality through small scale interventions.
Nothing is taken away and nothing heavy is added to
the city organism, but the present state of being is
realized as part of the process of rottening and being
ruined. Ruin is not a product, it is a process. City
must be a compost.
Acupuncture relieves stress in the body, urban
acupuncture relieves stress in the environment.
This process uses small-scale interventions to
transform the larger urban context. Sites are
selected through an aggregate analysis of
social, economic, and ecological factors, and
developed through a dialogue between
designers and the community.
Londons Urban Acupuncture: The Urban Physic Garden

Theres a meme Ive been hearing in design and

sustainability circles for a few years now: urban
acupuncture.
Despite its trendiness, I find it and the phenomenon it
describes irresistible.
The term refers to a theory that melds urban design with
Chinese medicine. Boiled down to a simple statement,
urban acupuncture means focusing on small, subtle,
bottom-up interventions that harness and direct
community energy in positive ways to heal urban
blight and improve the cityscape. Its meant as an
alternative to large, top-down, mega-interventions that
typically require heavy investments of municipal funds
(which many cities at the moment simply dont have) and
the navigation of yards of bureaucratic red tape.
The Guardian ran a very good article on urban
acupuncture last month. An excerpt:
while conventional wisdom dictates that
urban redevelopment requires the overhaul of
entire city blocks, Southern and de Monchaux
insist that street medians, foreclosed homes,
and vacant lots allow for more sustainable,
democratic, and ecological development.
Southern believes that instead of new parks
that are destination spaces, residents can
benefit from a series of micro-parks or
urban lounges that are enjoyed while they
walk to that favourite cafe or restaurant.
One of the most satisfying elements of projects is the
joy of a true grassroots, barn - raising kind of
collaboration.
Equally as important is their effectiveness, which often
outstrips their size and use of resources.
While passing a referendum to create a new city
park can easily become a controversial ballot-box
showdown, rallying support to quietly but steadfastly
transform a neglected lot into an urban food crop
produces results more quickly, with a ripple effect
thats joyful and inspiring.
Thats not to make it sound easy. Successfully
implementing urban acupuncture takes a heart full of
courage and a ton of work. But like those skinny
needles from which it derives its name it can often
gain access where a blunter tool just wont reach.