COVID-19 has left major eye-opening impacts on the society, which have been felt most largely on densely populated urban areas. While in the beginning, public spaces such as streets, parks, and playgrounds were considered to be high risk-prone areas, soon these exact spaces were looked at as makeshift alternatives for functions such as market spaces that sell essential goods. The 2020 pandemic experience has highlighted the reality that designers and planners need a moment to pause and assess the existing structure of these fast-moving cities and consider innovative and more importantly alternative solutions that ‘slow them down’.

While people return back to their usual cycles of work, leisure, and social behaviour, the relationship they share with the cities is not going to be the same, as cities themselves are no longer the same anymore. People now, are more aware and conscious, and expect the same from their cities as well. Streets and Public spaces are incredible assets that can be used to restructure cities into something more sustainable and equitable. These long-term changes will require lots of trial and error and temporary changes that will help understand what would work in the long run.

The tactical approach helps catalyse this process by not only being quick, easy to implement, cost-effective and creating new opportunities, but also allowing for various measures to be carried out in response to the pandemic.

India has made little progress in the past decades in taking vital steps towards creating cities that are safer, convenient, comfortable and affordable and more people-centric over cars. However, the Streets for People challenge, a city led design competition that rolled out  in December 2020, aimed to crowd source design innovations for pedestrian-friendly streets in 113 cities across the country. Re-imagining streets as public spaces with a focus on place making and liveability, through quick and inexpensive measures in response to the pandemic, was the main goal of the challenge, directed by the principles of tactical urbanism. This challenge was a way of acting on the need to rethink how busy Indian streets function. The temporary tactical inserts would be made permanent, based on the feedback and opinion of the public.

How can tactical urbanism help?

Tactical urbanism can be considered to be the ‘new age’ way of improving the quality of public spaces in cities. With the constantly transforming urban fabric, the city’s human assets need to be prioritized. For this, people need to be actively involved in the process of creating spaces that are defined by them. Tactical urbanism is a more humane design approach that creates spaces that allow citizens to pause, reflect, grow and express.

A people-friendly solution:

A strongly knit public transport network makes a city more sustainable, inclusive and affordable for larger strata of its population. Not to forget, the added benefits of less traffic congestion, less air and noise pollution. In major cities of India, a large population depends on public transport for their daily commute. Mumbai’s local rail network is one of the most densely populated transport networks in the world! The pandemic has induced paranoia when opting for public transport, leading to an added dependence on private vehicles and increased congestion.  Enabling safe use for pedestrians and bicyclists, regardless of age or ability and closure of streets to automobiles in exchange for free movement of people, rather than cars are the need of the hour. Tactical urbanism, which entails simply painting streets to demarcate zones for cyclists, pedestrians and vehicular traffic eases out this transformation and can even be done overnight!

An example of Sitabuldi market, Nagpur, where the overflowing pedestrian load, combined with increased vehicular traffic and on-street parking try to co-exist, but end up overpowering each other, hindering the function of each.