Little Free Libraries: an examination of micro-urbanist interventions

Sarmiento, Carolina S.; Sims, J. Revel; Morales, Alfonso

doi:10.1080/17549175.2017.1387588

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…7. In fact, some authors refer to these two concepts without making a clear distinction between them (De la Peña, 2019; Devlin, 2018;Sarmiento et al, 2018). 8.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They offer a distributed methodology for community-led projects in which small-scale interventions are initiated by local communities to address necessities at the level of small and medium public spaces (Devlin, 2018) and to give use to derelict urban spaces (Ashley, 2018;Berglund and Peipinen, 2018). Recent literature refers to the scale of interventions (Sarmiento et al, 2018) and how such local solutions can address major societal challenges, such as climate adaptation (Cloutier et al, 2018), energy transition (Radtke, 2014), urban regeneration (Van Meerkerk et al, 2013), etc.…”

Section: Jerusalem -A Contested Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Adaptation of the urban codes – A story of placemaking in Jerusalem

Rosner-Manor

Borghini

Boonstra

et al. 2019

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

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The tension between stability and adaptability, and the pursuit for mechanisms that allow cities to face internal and external pressures, is a fundamental question for contemporary urban planners. To understand this tension and to develop a complexity-based perspective for planning action that deals with this tension, we describe the city as a complex assemblage employing adaptive mechanisms in front of rapid change. We argue how processes of coding, decoding and recoding continuously take place in the urban setting and are part of such adaptive mechanisms, in particular where community’s informal codes diverge from formal practices. In this context, we examine ‘placemaking’ as an urban mechanism whose function is not only to allow different local voices to express themselves, but also to assist in updating and adapting the ‘urban DNA’ to the city constituents and their diversity. The placemaking project that took place in Jerusalem over the period 2016–2018 is analysed in this framework. We show how Jerusalem municipality is experimenting with new ways of working with very diverse populations via wide-scale community-led methodologies viewed as part of the city capacity to learn and adapt within a changing environment. We turn to epigenetics, a biological field researching micro- and macro-evolutionary mechanisms, to provide us with a theoretical descriptive model that can help represent the impact of such a wide project in both short-term and long-term recoding at the level of urban rules and regulations. This allows us to identify relevant operational mechanisms yielding novelty in approach to the co-existence between formal urban codes and local communities’ strong sub-codes.

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“…7. In fact, some authors refer to these two concepts without making a clear distinction between them (De la Peña, 2019; Devlin, 2018;Sarmiento et al, 2018). 8.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Jerusalem -A Contested Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptation of the urban codes – A story of placemaking in Jerusalem

Rosner-Manor

Borghini

Boonstra

et al. 2019

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

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“…No books were cataloged. Sarmiento et al (2018) observed and interacted with people who used and stewarded 15 LFLs across two US cities. They also did not catalog any books.…”

Section: Strengths and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in a book exchange: Examining contents in relation to steward intentions, geography, and public library collections

Mckenna-Foster

Roseen²

2022

Journal of Librarianship and Information Science

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In the last decade, book exchanges, most prominently those registered with the Little Free Library® network, have attracted the interest of researchers and media alike. Very little is known about what types of books are available in these book exchanges and how their collections compare to those in public libraries. To address this gap in knowledge, we selected a random sample of 42 Little Free Libraries across eight Seattle neighborhoods to inventory their contents. We interviewed the stewards about their stocking and weeding practices. Our inventory shows that most of the books available in Little Free Libraries are children’s, mystery, suspense, self-help/health, and scifi/fantasy books published in the last 10–30 years. Neighborhoods in our sample ranged in socioeconomic and racial diversity measures, but there were no significant differences in LFL contents related to those measures. We also compared our inventory to the collections of nearby public library branches and found Little Free Libraries offer a complementary rather than competitive selection scenario: books in LFLs are generally older, with a lesser proportion of children’s books and higher proportion of fiction books.

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“…Tactical urbanism has been associated with a diversity of programmes, projects and activitiesmany of which are unsanctioned, if not illegal; thus it can also be read as a political activity expressing ones right to the city (Iveson, 2013;Fabian & Samson, 2016;Spataro, 2016;Vallance et al, 2017; but see also Harvey, 2012;Lefebvre, 1992;Mitchell, 2003). For some (Sarmiento et al, 2018) tactical urbanism occupies a fairly neutral position between Do-It-Yourself urbanism (which tends to be community-led and directed towards functional improvements) and guerrilla or insurgent urbanism (which includes unsanctioned, critical, and explicitly political acts of a potentially more radical nature). For others (Finn, 2014;Iveson, 2013;Lennon & Moore, 2018) using De Certeau's (1984 understanding of tactics as adaptations to the conditions created by the (more powerful) strategists, tactical urbanism is necessarily political.…”

Section: Tactical Urbanism: 'Orthodox' Planning In Reverse?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Charting New Ground: Between Tactical Urbanism and Strategic Spatial Planning

Vallance

Edwards

2021

Planning Theory & Practice

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In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges associated with strategic spatial planning, including long-time frames, limited control, translation and implementation gaps. We then explore how tactical urbanism might, in theory, address these s given its emphasis on small-scale, immediate, experimental action for long-term change. Our research with a Charter-based, principles-led, action-oriented network is then used to test these possibilities in practice. We conclude that tactical urbanism can be considered the antithesis of, complement to, or antidote depending on the disposition of planning authorities.

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Little Free Libraries: an examination of micro-urbanist interventions

Cited by 9 publications

References 27 publications

Adaptation of the urban codes – A story of placemaking in Jerusalem

Adaptation of the urban codes – A story of placemaking in Jerusalem

What’s in a book exchange: Examining contents in relation to steward intentions, geography, and public library collections

Charting New Ground: Between Tactical Urbanism and Strategic Spatial Planning

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