Urban Acupuncture: Small-Scale interventions, Big Impacts

Urban Acupuncture: Small-Scale Interventions with Big Impacts

Exploring Urban Strategy Planning through collaborative workshops

At Dempsey + Gannon Architects, we’ve been exploring how considered, integrated and thoughtful, small-scale interventions can have an outsized effect on urban life. This idea is at the heart of Urban Acupuncture, a concept that aligns with both our commoning principles and strategic approaches to urban planning. Our recent session with MArch1 students in the AND Atelier at the Manchester School of Architecture explored how these “pinpricks” of change can ripple through a city to create lasting impact.

Urban Acupuncture, a term popularised by urbanist Jaime Lerner, suggests that even minor, well-placed interventions—whether a single street, park, or community space—can stimulate widespread transformation. In his book Urban Acupuncture, Lerner highlights projects and people from around the world whose focused efforts help reshape urban environments. This principle of leveraging small, empathetic, and precise interventions closely ties to the methodologies we apply in urban strategy planning.

During our workshop, students studied Sheffield, building on their personal interactions with individuals and places they encountered the week before. Using Urban Acupuncture techniques, they developed creative proposals that addressed specific urban challenges on a small but powerful scale, demonstrating that meaningful change can emerge from the simplest actions.

Linking Urban Acupuncture to Strategic Planning and the RIBA Plan of Work

In practice, the approach to urban acupuncture can be incorporated into urban strategy planning through the lens of the RIBA Plan of Work. While the RIBA Plan of Work outlines a structured approach to the lifecycle of building projects—from briefing, design, and technical development to handover—our work in the AND Atelier adapts these stages to consider the wider urban fabric.

For example:

• Stage 0 – Strategic Definition: Urban acupuncture fits seamlessly into the initial planning phase, where we define the project’s objectives and evaluate its potential. The key question here is: how can small interventions catalyse larger transformations in the community? Students’ explorations showed how minor alterations to public spaces could activate broader connections within Sheffield’s urban environment.

• Stage 1 – Preparation and Brief: Here, an empathetic understanding of the local context, often gathered through community engagement, lays the foundation. Students mapped Sheffield’s socio-spatial dynamics, aligning their brief with insights from the community to ensure their interventions were meaningful and impactful.

• Stage 2 – Concept Design: In this phase, the students developed design strategies that focus on “commoning” practices. These strategies explored how the intersection of community, space, and micro-interventions could spark connections that foster collaborative activities across the city. For example, small installations could enhance public interaction in spaces that might otherwise be overlooked.

This project in Sheffield demonstrates how this approach to urban strategy planning can yield results that align with the RIBA Plan of Work while offering a scalable model for other urban contexts. By focusing on common activity, the students have shown that modest yet intentional design changes can breathe new life into public spaces and urban environments.