Tactical Urbanism Interventions for the Urban Environment: Which Economic Impacts?

Abstract

In the last decades, the emergence of new social, environmental, and economic demands, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has led urban planning to innovate its themes, methods, and approaches. In this context, temporary urbanism has emerged as a mainstream approach. How-ever, the impacts of temporary approaches to urban planning are far from being fully understood. In this light, this study focuses on one of the mainstream approaches to temporary urbanism, tactical urbanism, and tries to understand its economic impacts on contemporary cities. Indeed, despite the growing interest in tactical urbanism interventions and their value as an urban regeneration tool, there are no specific reflections focused on investigating their economic effects. Based on these premises, this paper focuses on different tactical urbanism experiences in the Italian context and tries to assess the economic impacts of tactical urbanism interventions by adopting the lens of real estate values as a suitable proxy when dealing with urban environments. The first obtained results show that the experiences of tactical urbanism, partly because of their temporary nature and their tendency toward minimal intervention, fail to trigger regeneration processes or produce significant economic impacts on the territory. Instead, such experiences can play a role in accelerating or consolidating urban regeneration processes already underway, and, in this sense, they contribute to the generation of economic impact on the territory.