Urban design and place‑making are frequently positioned as vehicles for delivering inclusive, liveable cities, yet planning and design research often struggles to account for how places are actually shaped through everyday, informal use. This paper advances a central argument: urban place is produced not only through formal design intentions, but through ongoing, often unplanned practices that appropriate and reinterpret designed space. Recognising these practices is essential for strengthening place‑based planning.

The paper draws on doctoral research examining everyday use of urban greenspaces. It employs unstructured observations combined with mapping to document how students occupy, adapt, and use designed greenspaces in ways that frequently sit outside intended programmes or regulatory frameworks. On this basis, the paper introduces the concept of guerrilla use as an analytic term to describe informal, user‑led spatial practices that quietly subvert, extend, or repurpose urban design without explicit permission or formal recognition.

The findings demonstrate that guerrilla use plays a significant role in shaping comfort, attachment, and sense of place, revealing experiential dynamics that are largely invisible within conventional planning and urban design evaluation tools. By showing how everyday practices interact with micro‑scale design conditions, the paper challenges dominant place‑making approaches that prioritise visual coherence or predefined uses over lived experience.

The paper’s contribution lies in conceptualising guerrilla use as a critical lens for urban design and place‑making research, bridging experiential evidence and spatial analysis. It argues that recognising informal use can enhance planning’s capacity to support more responsive, inclusive, and genuinely place‑based urban design.