Anthony Garcia

Garcia and Lydon took a practice that already existed — painting a crossing, closing a street on a Sunday, putting benches where there were none — and turned it into a method: cheap, reversible interventions that test an idea before committing budget.

Its value lies in inverting the usual order. Instead of study, design, works and evaluation, you trial first and measure afterwards. That lets a provisional bike lane prove its demand before being paved, and makes a mistake cost paint rather than a political term.

An American urbanist based in Miami, Garcia leads with Mike Lydon the studio Street Plans, which since 2009 has designed quick, cheap interventions on the streets of dozens of cities in the Americas and Europe. Together they wrote Tactical Urbanism (2015), the book that gave the movement its name and method: test with paint, planters and bollards what can later be made permanent, measure the result and adjust. Their Tactical Urbanist's Guide to Materials and Design (2016), written for city governments, has become a working manual for temporary plazas and lanes.

Their work draws on New York's experience with Janette Sadik-Khan and on Street Plans projects in Miami, Burlington or Bogotá, and spread strongly during the pandemic, when cities widened pavements and terraces within weeks. Critics of tactical urbanism warn that the temporary can replace permanent investment and that showy interventions reach wealthy neighbourhoods first; Garcia replies that the method serves precisely to test where the traditional plan does not reach.