Senior Associate Interface Studio LLC Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
How do you leverage a pilot project to create lasting change? This presentation explores two related pilot projects in Philadelpha and New York City and how they were designed to go from pilot to permanent.
Pilot projects (also known as tactical urbanism or pop-ups) have become important planning tools, but too often they fail to ‘stick’ and disappear in a short period of time. These are lost opportunities. Pilots that allow people to experience changes in person can be effective tools that build support for new approaches to long-standing problems, such as allocating space on a street or improving the quality of the public realm in marginalized neighborhoods. The projects in Philadelphia and New York City offer transferrable strategies for making a pilot’s lessons more permanent and meaningful.
NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Foundational. For more on learning-level descriptions, visit our General Information Page.
Learning Objectives:
Articulate why pilot projects can sometimes be more effective at tackling controversial issues than traditional planning and design processes.
Create a roadmap for sustaining and growing a pilot project from launch to desired, long-term objectives.
Share the impacts of pilot projects more effectively through storytelling and quantifiable outcomes (and understand the importance of doing so).
