From practice to policy: frameworks for temporary use

From informal, experimental practice, temporary use has become a structured policy in many cities in the past years. The responses given to the problem of empty properties appear at various levels of urban planning and policy. Some municipalities open up their real estate databases to engage citizens and entrepreneurs in revitalizing empty properties; others create frameworks for mediating between property owners and potential users; introduce incentives by raising taxes or tax exemptions, facilitate permission procedures, or secure funding and loans by offering public guarantees. While these policies correspond largely to their specific political, economic, social, and cultural contexts, they converge in their attempt to create a better connection between citizen and community initiatives and public policies. In this paper, the authors present an incomplete inventory of municipal policies and approaches elaborated in the past decade, offering examples to feed the continuous quest of how to include communities in the planning process and better integrate local initiatives in development projects.