The Help-Yourself City
Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism
Gordon C.C. Douglas
Reviews and Awards
"Rising above mere ethnographic survey of 'do it yourself' urban projects-like guerrilla gardening or citizens' refashioning an urban space-Douglas inventories civic engagement full-on, including larger issues of social order and the costs and benefits of people taking pieces of the city into their own hands. Always thoughtful and without naiveté, he gives us a glimpse of pathways for urban reform and, more important, some manifestations of hope." --Harvey Molotch, author of Against Security
"A book I have long been waiting for! Douglas explores the diverse ways in which people engage urban space and bring their ideas on to the streets themselves through site-specific planning efforts. The book shows us the broad range of urban knowledges present in any city neighborhood, but also the challenges of negotiating them in public space." --Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions
"Do It Yourself urban design is an insubordinate, self-authorized, 'informal,' response to both the deficits of official planning and to the 'help yourself' regime of our old friend, neoliberalism. In this fascinating-and critical-reading, Douglas presents DIY as a progressive inversion of the broken windows theory of policing, rejecting control by coercive orderliness and seeking to cure deficits in the public realm by wanton acts of creative, corrective -if often privileged-addition." --Michael Sorkin, author of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
