The Market Street Prototyping Festival is just finishing up in San Francisco. The festival, which is now in its 3rd year, is centered around urban interventions that can be rapidly prototyped and tested. The goal is to discover new ideas that could be used to transform and improve Market Street – the city’s civic spine. It is a joint effort of both the San Francisco Planning Department and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Here is a list of all the prototypes. You can “like” projects, but I wish they would have made it easier to filter and see which ones are the most popular.

One project that I liked is Vote With Your Feet. It consists of two doorways and a single crowdsourced YES/NO question above it. You vote by choosing a doorway. Once you walk through, you are then shown the results. Here’s a Boomerang video of it in action. I like it because it provides a frictionless way to acquire lots of ground-up feedback. Imagine placing something like this at the exit of a busy train station or transforming the existing doors.

Tactical urbanism can be a great mechanism for investigating and instigating positive change. This is hugely important considering how slow moving and bureaucratic city building can be. It’s not the same format, but NXT City here in Toronto has similar ambitions. They source new ideas for our public spaces from young people. I am thrilled that both of these initiatives exist.

It’s great to be back in Philly. I have a real sense of nostalgia around this city.

Last night my friends took me to a popup beer garden on South Street put on by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Before the popup garden, it was just an abandoned lot.

There seems to be a real culture of beer gardens in Philly, which is something I don’t think we have in Toronto. Why is that?

Part of the reason, I think, is that there’s a greater spread between desirable and undesirable neighborhoods in Philly than in Toronto. And in the undesirable ones, urbanists have to work really hard to figure out ways to activate them.

So really these popup beer gardens are a lean urbanist intervention. It’s a way to draw people to an area and create awareness. And I’m told that often these popup gardens end up becoming development sites.

Because of this, these popup gardens are sometimes controversial within communities. They’re seen as a catalyst and precursor to gentrification. But that’s a whole other debate.

What I find interesting is this grassroots approach to city building. Great spaces don’t have to be expensive. Sometimes seating, lighting, and beer are all you need to bring people together.

The term “lean” is well known in technology and startup circles. Thanks to people like Eric Ries and Steve Blank, it’s become all about starting up lean and not investing a lot of time and money before you’ve really tested your business assumptions in the marketplace.

But keeping it lean isn’t unique to just tech companies. Its origins are actually in manufacturing—mostly from Toyota’s celebrated production system. Lately though, it has been starting to make its way into cities with a new buzzword called “Lean Urbanism.”

Championed by New Urbanist Andres Duany—who is actually in the midst of writing a book on the topic—the methodology seems to be gaining awareness in cities spanning from Detroit to San Diego. Here’s an article that a friend of mine (currently working in San Diego) sent me yesterday on the topic.

At first, the article gave me the impression that the movement was all about building as-of-right. That is, build what’s allowed and stop asking for special discretionary permissions, which is often how real estate development works.

But then I started to do a bit more research.

And it turns out that Lean Urbanism is about something much deeper. It’s about empowering incremental urban growth:

"Lean Urbanism…focuses on revitalizing cities by finding ways for people to participate in community-building — specifically, by enabling everyday people to get things done."

What Lean Urbanism hopes to do is create tools and techniques that will help local communities avoid and workaround overly onerous regulations. It’s about removing the barriers to entry—whether that be a business permit or a building permit—so that more people can participate in shaping their own community.

What I like about it is that it’s building upon the renewal cycle that has traditionally always powered cities. It hopes to empower the proverbial artist that moves into a neighborhood like New York’s Soho and magically makes it cool—then spurring an onslaught of investment.

And so while the buzzword might be new, it’s a renewal cycle we’ve seen before. But, if it works, maybe not with so much frequency.