News Roundup

Public PARK

An arts collective and a nonprofit bring activism and expression to a parking space near you

By Michael E. Ross for MSN City Guides

The streets of San Francisco were the proving ground for an experiment on using parking spaces as park space. Now it’s becoming a global phenomenon.
t may be the fondest wish for city dwellers forced to drive and park their cars in a crowded city. It could be the deepest dream of lovers of greenspace who feel trapped by ribbons of concrete and asphalt: Turning a parking space into … a park.

A one-day global event is preparing to do exactly that. If only for one day.

On Friday the San Francisco-based REBAR art collective joins forces with The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit land conservation organization, to celebrate PARK Day, during which artists, activists and ordinary citizens will convert metered parking spots into temporary public parks in locations around the world.

The idea originated in San Francisco - a city that knows a thing or three about tight parking — as a one-off in November 2005, when REBAR devised the “PARK” idea as a way to explore new and artistic ways of using metered parking space. The idea was first executed in a space on Mission Street near downtown San Francisco with 200 square feet of roll-up sod, a 15-foot tree, a park bench and the chutzpah common to San Franciscans. The trial-run event generated attention around the world.

The collective connected with the Trust in 2006, collaborating to create “PARK Day,” which basically expanded on the original Bay Area experiment, making it a national and global experience. Some 47 other locations got into the act. The 2007 event was bigger still; some 200 temporary parks in 50 cities were constructed.

The farrago of legal entanglements one might expect — every city has different traffic and parking laws and restrictions — apparently never materialized. The main reason: PARK Day organizers brilliantly exploited the nature of financial transactions surrounding the public parking space.

The event’s how-to manual explains: “just as it is completely within the rights of individuals to buy up shares of a publicly-traded company, PARK Day participants paid meters and exercised their option to do something other than park cars in real estate that they, for the moment, owned.”

“Motivated by the desire to exploit the metered parking space as a site for art, activism, and cultural expression, REBAR offers PARK Day as a prototype for open source urban design accessible to all,” says a statement in the project’s “assembly manual.”

The plan is a daring one; even if it fills the coffers of a city’s parking agency, it would seem to risk raising the ire of commuters desperately seeking a place to park. In San Francisco itself — a city with an estimated 24,000 metered parking spaces — a parking space is a precious commodity. An urban planning expert at the University of California-Los Angeles found that drivers hunting for parking spaces amount for some 30 percent of all traffic in downtown San Francisco.

How will the PARK Day project deal with that? “The number of parking spaces we actually occupy is far less than the total [available] in San Francisco,” said Matthew Passmore, REBAR founder and director. Anyway, he said, “it’s making a larger point about how much of our public space is handed over to the automobile without much input from the average citizen. It’s also about getting people to think more broadly and creatively about what sort of systems actually create a city — what forces actually build a city.”

The question naturally follows: If it’s good on one day of the year, why not more often?

“This has a symbolic value,” Passmore said. “It’s a spectacular sort of intervention. Even if it does briefly colonize parking space, the statement it makes about public space is so much greater on a single day.”

The Trust for Public Land has published a list of U.S. and international cities participating in the 2008 event. If you’d like to volunteer to be involved, contact the Trust for Public Land at (415) 495-4014.

Michael E. Ross is an MSN producer.