User generated urbanism: Park(ing) day reclaim your city

Once more it is time for Park(ing) day, a worldwide event that invites common citizens everywhere to engage in transforming metered parking spots into temporary parks or public spaces. 2011 is the seventh year that Park(ing) day is being organized, gaining more and more participants and becoming more visible and significant.  30 countries, 186 cities and 850 parks where created during Park(ing) day 2010, showing how engaged people are in transforming car space into social/green space.

Besides being a fun activity, Park(ing) day intends to create discussions how cities’ open space is used, criticize the priority given in many cities to cars, reflect  how public space is created and allocated, and of course to try to improve the quality of urban areas, at least in a small scale and temporary.

Over the years this event have served to organize Urban DIY groups in many cities as well as raised important questions to city planners and politicians. In some cities it has been used as an inspiration for municipal planning initiatiatives, such as San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks program (see more about this kind of strategies in “New approaches to Public Space: Reclaim, Test, Evaluate, Establish”). It has also become an interesting design exercise as many groups experiment with new forms of public space design.

Image by lunch street party

Here you can find a very interesting video showing what Park(ing) day is all about

  1. francene-arnold reblogged this from urbandifference
  2. urbnist said: actually just included this great event in a wordpress post on guerilla urbanism and its intersections with public participation and citizen power. nice post! user generated urbanism is incredibly inspiring.
  3. urbnist reblogged this from urbandifference
  4. urbandifference posted this