Design: It's About Time: the temporal vs. the permanent, and how they are shaping our urban public realm today.

Walking around San Francisco today, one can see -- as in many other large cities - an apparent explosion of "pop-up" interventions on streets, parking lanes, alleys, medians, and other underutilized urban real estate. Although the concept of temporary interventions in urban environments is not a new one, the formalization of these by a myriad of grassroots programs such as Parking Day, Pavement to Parks, Off the Grid, farmer's markets associations, and more makes them more noticeable and perceived by many city dwellers as a movement.

Current economic and political pressures to reduce expenditures on public realm projects, paired with our current/resulting entrepreneurial inclination to solve the problems of our cities (or maybe take advantage of new markets/opportunities provided by the higher personal mobility we experience today with mobile gadgets and flex work arrangements), has created the "perfect storm" for this phenomenon to take strong root in San Francisco.