Improvisation and Planning: Engaging With Unforeseen Encounters in Urban Public Space

Despite the significant emphasis in Scandinavian cities on vital urban spaces and creative unfolding in urban development, there is a tendency towards forming urban spaces as finished. The result is often standardized design and staged play, ignoring the diversity of lived experience taking place in the here and now. How can urban planning create room for the unforeseen and unfinished? In this article, we explore the potential of improvisation in urban planning by examining how urban public spaces facilitate or hinder improvisation in interactions between strangers. Improvisation is understood as a productive force in urban development that gives space to what occurs in urban encounters. Through examples of improvisational practices occurring in public spaces in Norway and Denmark, we emphasize the performative, affective and sensory elements of urban life. We show how flexible spaces, where common efforts of building a children’s playground or youngsters entering public spaces through theatre performance, can contribute to a multitude of connections whereby people can engage with each other and their sensory landscape. We argue for a more underdetermined and place-sensitive form of city-making and more life-enhancing urban space designs that stimulate varied, spontaneous and changeable use.