Park(ing)
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” This quote, along with our conversation this week about the effect that the built environment has on politics reminded me of the Park(ing) interventions that started in San Francisco in 2005. A few people wanted to see a change in their city, so they made it happen. They turned parking spaces into a small park for a few hours and transformed that space into something better. The Park(ing) movement quickly spread to cities all over the world, and now it is celebrated every year on the third Friday of September. Parking spaces become a space of beauty and social engagement. Three years after the first Park(ing) day, the group who started the interventions was asked to start building more permanent installations called “parklets”. There are now more than 50 of them spread across San Francisco.
This is a fun take-over of space that is really positive and starts conversations about the vast seas of asphalt that cover our cities. I wonder if there are any case studies where the Park(ing) days resulted in a city uprooting some of their surface lots.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really good example of how small claims to the city can start a movement. I think that sometimes we get lost in the grand plan and we should really be starting with smaller steps.
ReplyDeleteI like how the fact that the city recognizes the need to make its people have ownership over these spaces by doing such smaller interventions.
ReplyDeleteWe probably need more of such ideas to actually deal with infrastructure crisis and alienation in the city
It's a really interesting example that shows the power of a small change. I feel this kind of Park(ing) is small but beautiful and more efficient than a real park. It could be a good call that even the city is more defined by a few, we probably can start with some little things to affect others and change the city.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a good example to show how can we occupy those parking spaces into some other functions.
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