7 Products of PARK(ing)

What do people get out of PARK(ing) Day? People are drawn to the event by the ease and legitimacy of the opportunity it presents for participation in shaping the city. For many, the idea that paying a parking meter legitimates public and very visible interventions is exciting and inspiring. Particularly enticing is the potential for those brief interventions to bring about some longer-lasting change.

Most often, participants join PARK(ing) Day with hopes of reshaping the city in some way. Policy and physical shifts are the goals people mention first; they are also the goals that people refer to in evaluating the event. Some make very bold claims about the success of PARK(ing) Day in achieving such change; others are more dismissive, suggesting that tiny, temporary interventions like PARK(ing) Day do not have any lasting impact, and that shifts in planning and policy should be attributed instead to other activities.

In reflecting on their engagement and its effects after the event, participants often raised a different set of impacts. For many, the most significant products of PARK(ing) Day turn out to be more personal and more diffuse. Building a park on PARK(ing) Day can be an affective experience, prompting a rethinking of the city and one’s place within it. This is rarely pursued explicitly, often unexpected, and in some cases was not even recognized until participants reflected on the event in our discussions. Perhaps most significant among the personal impacts described by participants is the development of a sense of ownership for the site and its surroundings. Feelings of ownership are in many cases strengthened and sustained through participation in PARK(ing) Day, and can in turn lead participants to engage in the city in other, more lasting ways.

Instead of a linear path from idea to implementation, objectives to outcomes, PARK(ing) Day can be understood as a prefigurative practice: an open, experimental acting out of alternatives with unpredictable consequences for participants and for the cities with which they engage. The creation of a parklet policy by the City of San Francisco is perhaps the most recognizable example of this: that the 2005 PARK(ing) installation would lead to this kind of change was not even contemplated by Rebar at the time.

There is also the possibility that PARK(ing) Day might bring about less positive change, particularly when considered amongst other forms of DIY urbanism. While pop-up parks are generally seen as too transient to contribute to processes of gentrification, some participants were concerned that the event might distract or divert attention away from more meaningful advocacy. The close connection between ownership and privilege is also significant: while PARK(ing) Day opens up opportunities for participation in city-making, those opportunities are not open to everyone, at least not equally.

7.1 Changing the city

People use it as a reference. (Carlo Tadeo, Montréal)

The development most often attributed to PARK(ing) Day—both by participants and in wider commentary on the event—is the emergence of parklets (figure 7.1). Particularly in San Francisco, PARK(ing) Day is generally understood as the event that prompted the City to develop a program to facilitate the conversion of parking spaces into semipermanent public spaces. Participants also link the event with a range of other changes: new policies and regulations promoting and prescribing measures to increase amenity for pedestrians and cyclists; shifts in both public and official attitudes and expectations about how the city can and should be regulated.

Parklets have a direct connection to PARK(ing) Day. In 2010, Rebar produced a modular system for a “walklet,” a more permanent version of the kinds of parks built on PARK(ing) Day. This was conceived as an extension of the sidewalk to enable pedestrians to walk around the tables and chairs that took up space outside of cafés and restaurants. When Rebar took this to Andres Power, a planner with the City, he loved the idea but suggested a modification: pedestrians should retain the sidewalk, and the chairs and tables should instead move into the parking space. Power also suggested a catchier name for these interventions: parklets.1

Rebar worked with the City of San Francisco to develop a trial of the parklet concept, including developing a design manual for the City.2 Rebar designed a prototype modular parklet for the City (later displayed on Rebar’s website, available for purchase as the Walklet), as well as site-specific parks for two clients (one outside Caffè Greco in North Beach, the other the conversion of an old Citroen van into a parklet outside the Rapha bike shop in the Marina district, somewhat controversial as the permit was not obtained until after construction). The idea took off quickly: by the end of 2010, there were twelve parklets in development;3 by the beginning of 2013, 38 parklets had been installed across the city;4 by March 2015, that number exceeded 50.5

Many of the parklets built in San Francisco were on sites that had previously been used for parks on PARK(ing) Day: outside Caffè Greco, for example, and in front of the Brainwash Café on Folsom Street in the SoMa district. This link can be seen clearly on Valencia Street, once a popular location for PARK(ing) Day, as Passmore recalls:

Just a couple of years ago I was on the phone on PARK(ing) Day with a reporter from ABC News and she said, “You know, we want to go out and find a concentration of parks. Where should we go?” And I was just getting off the BART in the Mission and I said “Oh well, I’m about to ride my bike down Valencia Street to the studio. So I’ll call you, usually there’s a dozen of them on Valencia.” So I started riding down Valencia and I saw a parklet, parklet, parklet, parklet, no PARK(ing) Day installations, but parklets, officially sanctioned PARK(ing) Day-type installations. So that was maybe 2013 when I realized San Francisco has moved past the sort of questions that we brought up with PARK(ing) Day.

PARK(ing) Day is widely understood as giving rise to parklets around the world as well as locally, with San Francisco seen as a key influence for parklet programs in other cities.6 San Francisco’s parklet policy has been well publicized, and has provided a model for the many cities adopting parklet programs since 2010.7 Studies examining the positive impacts of parklets on local business in San Francisco provided important support for the establishment of parklet policies in other jurisdictions.8 In Sydney, several planners from various local authorities have traveled to San Francisco and visited various parklets across the city, and San Francisco’s parklet policy has been an important resource for local authorities examining and developing their own policies.

In turn, parklets are recognized as contributing to other developments at the city level in San Francisco. The 2012 Urban Prototyping Festival and 2015 Market Street Prototyping Festival (MSPF) were often mentioned. John Bela makes a strong link between these events and PARK(ing) Day, suggesting they were directly inspired by the PARK(ing) Day-to-parklet story, and conceived with the aim of replicating this kind of trajectory from DIY beginnings to citywide adoption.9 This is clearest in the MSPF, a partnership between the City, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Knight Foundation from 2015. The MSPF was established with the aim of generating ideas that could in turn be developed into new permit instruments or operating procedures comparable to the parklet program. It began with an open call for proposals, from which around 50 projects were selected. Successful entrants were given $2,000 for materials and support from design professionals to develop their proposals into installations; these were then installed for three days in April, grouped in five clusters along Market Street. The Festival ran again in 2016, with hashtags allowing passersby to vote for their favorite installation and in turn inform the City’s planning process for the Market Street area (figure 7.2). Several former participants in PARK(ing) Day have been involved in the Festival.

PARK(ing) Day has been connected also to policy shifts, including policies aimed at enhancing walkability, activation, and creativity in cities, and reducing the focus on cars in urban planning and design. During my time in San Francisco, many participants were excited to tell me about the preparation (and, near the end of my stay, the passing) of a new ordinance amending the San Francisco Planning Code to provide a clear legal basis for “parks” and related activities.

The new ordinance . . . you couldn’t get a more positive example of how this sort of stuff gets pulled into part of the city’s process. (’Deep Jawa, San Francisco)

These connections are recognized even within the City, as one official explained:

Generally the attitude and orientation of San Francisco’s policies, our street policies, our public space policies, our transportation policies, you know, are in some way advanced and propelled by this international movement that PARK(ing) Day is. And so there are many other things, I mean I, you know, in San Francisco in particular, that have driven the development of things like our Better Streets plan and stuff like that. But it’s part of that forward movement, it’s part of that thrust. So I think that there have been policy impacts, certainly. I mean here in 2016, we’re trying to pass an ordinance, you know, at long last that will facilitate parklets and pedestrian plazas. (Robin Abad Ocubillo, San Francisco)

Participants suggested that PARK(ing) Day has played a role in many other projects around San Francisco. One connected PARK(ing) Day to the more recent conversion of shipping containers to form mobile miniparks with plants and seating by the Yerba Buena Arts Center. Another linked PARK(ing) Day to a range of interventions by the San Francisco Municipal Transformation Agency (SFMTrA, a play on the City’s Municipal Transportation Agency, the SFMTA) to make city streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians, deploying techniques from spraypainting crosswalks to installing bollards along bike lanes, techniques that are often hard to distinguish from those of the SFMTA.

Some participants noted more direct impacts, with improvements secured or under development for the particular sites on which they built their parks. The park built by CC Puede on Cesar Chavez Street, for example, was later followed by traffic calming, turning what was a “traffic sewer” into a street that is now much safer and more pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists as well as cars. More recently, the group of businesses that installed three “parks” along Howard Street in 2016 were inspired by the event to develop a longer-term strategy for the street, and secured support from the city to progress this.

Participants in Sydney and Montréal made connections with a range of planning shifts also. In Montréal, interviewees frequently linked PARK(ing) Day to curbside “build-outs.” These involve extending the curb to create more footpath space and/or garden areas, typically near intersections to increase safety and amenity for pedestrians. PARK(ing) Day was connected also to proposals for the permanent removal of many parking spaces to improve amenity for pedestrians and cyclists along Rue Saint-Catherine, the main commercial street in Montréal. Others linked PARK(ing) Day to the parklet-style timber deck installed over several hundred meters along the major commercial street Rue Saint-Denis in 2014. This was an effort (albeit not a very successful one) to improve amenity for shops, restaurants, and other businesses while extensive road works were undertaken along the street.

Participants also noted the increasing popularity of parklet-style terrasses installed during summer outside bars and restaurants, as well as newer placottoirs (explained to me as a term derived from an Italian word to describe engaging in conversation simply for the pleasure of it) installed over parking spaces by local business associations rather than one particular café (figure 7.3).

Now, after that you have the replication of parklets everywhere in the city, you have people asking for that. The main change has been on mentalities . . . people that understand the importance of . . . greater mobility, the use of space by people who are just saying cars are not the only way to animate the city and to make it dynamic. (Félix Gravel, Montréal)

As in San Francisco, PARK(ing) Day was linked also to broader policy changes and shifts in public attitudes in Montréal. In particular, the event was connected to the growing support for and greater implementation of policies reducing the availability of on-street parking. The event has gained official recognition and support in Montréal’s new parking strategy, which requires the City to support and facilitate activities such as PARK(ing) Day.10

In Sydney, participants were more hesitant to link PARK(ing) Day to changes in the city. Several suggested that PARK(ing) Day is too tiny to achieve any lasting change.

PARK(ing) Day was a rogue activity, four people? . . . I felt as soon as we had left, although a few people might have thought slightly differently about a parking space, in general it was exactly as it was before. . . . If I was a decision maker in council, what does a very temporary, rogue protest have, what effect does that have on my planning? Zero. None . . . it was too small to have an impact. (Eytan Rocheta, Sydney)

Concerns about the lack of consequences dissuade some people from engaging in the event. One interviewee explained that she liked the idea but didn’t want to build a park herself, deciding instead to encourage a colleague to get her students involved:

for me it was a balance of the effort required. . . . If I thought I could kill a motorway by having a parklet there for one day I’d be out there doing it every day! For what I thought I could get out of it, I wasn’t putting the effort in. (Kerryn Wilmot, Sydney)

Others did find changes that could be linked to PARK(ing) Day, especially parklets and various temporary (and temporary-looking) interventions around the city. As participants in all three cities note, however, these developments cannot be traced to PARK(ing) Day alone. In considering the many urban interventions that have been linked to PARK(ing) Day, there is a problem of attribution. It is difficult to say with certainty what came out of the event, and what should more accurately be traced to other sources.

It feels like there’s a more, there’s an approach to adapting to things by taking over parking that I think is influenced by PARK(ing) Day. I really do think that.

. . . It’s hard to say because there is a general trend toward more pedestrian-friendly streets, and there are a lot of things that have been done recently in New York towards that. And I mean it would be ridiculous to say that John Bela and Blaine are responsible for it. (Amy Seek, San Francisco)

Even for parklets, the story must include more than PARK(ing) Day. As one of the early organizers from the Trust for Public Land commented:

The parklet movement I don’t think began in San Francisco, although I believe there’s a bit of myth that it did. But I think it absolutely gained a considerable amount of traction because of PARK(ing) Day. (Matthew Shaffer, San Francisco)

San Francisco’s parklet program is part of a larger Pavement to Parks (now Groundplay) initiative. This was informed by PARK(ing) Day but also other developments, particularly the Plaza Program introduced in New York City in 2008.11 Visits by Danish urban designer Jan Gehl and by New York Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn to San Francisco in 2008 provided strong encouragement for the establishment of a program within the city to improve amenity for pedestrians.12 Other precedents are also relevant, including several already mentioned: the sidewalk plazas proposed by Public Architecture, the sidewalk landscaping permits Jane Martin and Plant*SF worked with the City of San Francisco to develop, and the street furniture installed by Steve Rasmussen Cancian and others in Oakland. Further afield, there are also many precedents that may have played some role. In Montréal, for example, local authorities have had permitting processes for the conversion of parking spaces into terrasses since at least 2006.13

Broader shifts in planning and urban design were also influential, with events such as Ciclovía, Sunday Streets, Better Block, and Critical Mass (another event originating in San Francisco that has since spread internationally) prompting a rethinking of the allocation of urban space since at least the 1990s. In Montréal, several participants cited texts such as Donald Shoup’s The High Price of Free Parking (2005) and Charles Montgomery’s Happy City (2013) as important drivers for their engagement in PARK(ing) Day, perhaps more important even than Rebar.14 Daniel Bouchard, who began the CRE’s PARK(ing) Day campaign, was unsure where he first heard about the idea of taking over parking spaces, but thought it probably wasn’t actually PARK(ing) Day.

Planning policy and professional training in all three countries (and many others) had similarly been moving away from car-based planning to more small-scale, pedestrian-centered design with the growing popularity of new urbanism and transit-oriented development among practitioners and policymakers in planning. A greater focus on activities originating outside formal planning processes coincides also with the broader policy shifts toward participation and partnerships with the private sector in urban policy. Several participants used the term “zeitgeist” in discussing PARK(ing) Day.

All of that contributes to the way we see our cities being different in the future. And I think PARK(ing) Day is part of that. I mean maybe it’s just the zeitgeist of now, but I think people even just hearing about PARK(ing) Day or experiencing it question, you know, “Is it better for me to ride my bike or walk?” or “How do I get to work?” and “Why do I use one mode of transportation over another?” and “I might be part of some sort of better sharing of the environment.” It’s interesting that all of those things really didn’t exist before this whole movement. (Zoee Astrachan, San Francisco)

You know how these things become almost like part of the zeitgeist? It’s just lots of people are thinking about it at the same time. So I didn’t even know about PARK(ing), we were doing this and then it, it’s sort of the same thing. (Sam Crawford, Sydney)

Rebar’s participation in the Venice Biennale in 2008 was alongside several other designers working in comparable ways. Other projects in the US Pavilion that year included a lightweight mobile house, a public art project developed in a derelict Detroit neighborhood, and a mobile swimming pool made from a decommissioned cargo barge.15 The Italian pavilion featured a range of design practices approaching the city in ways much like Rebar: testing regulatory niches, experimenting with small-scale, temporary interventions to catalyze broader debate. The celebration of these practices at the Biennale was itself one of many. By 2008, “DIY,” “guerrilla,” “adaptive,” “tactical, “everyday,” or “insurgent” urbanism had become the subject of much scholarly and popular attention.16

Many of the practices now understood as part of a “new” approach to urban design in fact have much longer histories. A wide range of practices—from street art and graffiti to food trucks and street vendors, from sit-ins and squats to “plant-ins” and community gardens—can be understood as precedents for PARK(ing) Day, and for many of the practices with which it has since been linked.

Accordingly, many of the changes linked to PARK(ing) Day in fact predate the event. This is particularly apparent in Montréal, where there is a rich tradition of citizen and community-led urban interventions. As noted above, permitting programs for parking space terrasses have been in existence since at least 2006; various other forms of outdoor terrasses have much longer histories across the city.17 The closure of Rue Saint-Catherine through the summer started in 2008, and was preceded by temporary closures well before then.18 Summer street closures in the Downtown area have been a regular occurrence since at least 1980, when they were undertaken as part of the Jazz Festival. Long-running precedents for the reclamation of public space can be found also in other parts of the city. These include temporary street closures, ranging from those organized over the past decade by groups such as Rue Publique to more spontaneous closures as part of block parties and neighborhood gatherings.19 There are also precedents entailing more permanent reclamations of public space, such as the conversion of laneways into permanent ruelles vertes (green alleys) since at least 1999.20

In Sydney, participants tend to associate shifts in planning policy and practice with other trends, particularly precedents from cities at the top of various livability and innovation rankings such as Vancouver, New York, or Copenhagen (Jan Gehl, the Copenhagen-based founder of Gehl Studio, has consulted on several major projects in Sydney). Participants are more likely to trace parklets to complete streets or Better Block approaches than to PARK(ing) Day. Parklets are still relatively new in Sydney, with just a small number built on a trial basis. Only one of Sydney’s councils, Waverley Council, has a process in place to allow for parklets.21 Waverley’s parklet policy was introduced as part of a broader urban interventions program, which includes public art, play spaces, and bike facilities as well as parklets and explains these as “following the Complete Streets Strategy.”22 Several parklet trials in other areas can be traced to a Better Block project along Clovelly Road, and the parklet structure built for that project.23 One of Sydney’s earliest parklets, a garden built over two parking spaces in Surry Hills by Sam Crawford Architects in 2009, was conceived and installed in response to local conditions, without any reference to parklets, PARK(ing) Day, or any other precedents.24

Even in San Francisco, participants in recent years had often heard about PARK(ing) Day only after hearing about parklets. Sustainability consultancy Stok, for example, heard about PARK(ing) Day after their request for permission to install a parklet was declined. Stok’s participation in PARK(ing) Day was explicitly undertaken in the hope that a temporary, material transformation of the space might help to prompt a revision of that decision.

The impacts of PARK(ing) Day on urban planning and governance can also be underestimated. While New York’s Pavement to Plazas program was influential in the development of San Francisco’s parklet program, PARK(ing) Day may have influenced New York in its policy development (as several participants claimed). Similarly, in suggesting that parklets in Sydney should be traced to Better Block, there remains a link with PARK(ing) Day, since the Better Block approach was itself inspired at least in part by PARK(ing) Day.25 Many of the other activities—from one-off interventions to more formal policies incorporating complete streets and creative cities approaches—can also be linked to PARK(ing) Day. The increasing circulation of images and ideas makes tracing lineages very difficult. As one participant commented with respect to a story in Sydney’s tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, deriding participants in PARK(ing) Day as “park raving-mad” and likely to cause “traffic chaos and disruption to local businesses”:26

even though it was bad press, I think any press is good press. And I know a few people in the Department of Planning that saw that article that hadn’t heard of PARK(ing) Day before and that then looked at PARK(ing) Day and what PARK(ing) Day was about and they were like “Yeah, that makes sense. You know, maybe we can embed it.” I think there’s a whole lot of tangible and intangible things that come from something like that. You know, because it really, there is shock quality I think for some people around PARK(ing) Day and I think that stays with them for a little while. (John O’Callaghan, Sydney)

Most participants are confident that the event does have some impact. One way to understand the significance of PARK(ing) Day for the practice of city-making in this context is in terms of discourse. PARK(ing) Day provided a way to connect previously small-scale and largely unnoticed activities. In Montréal, one participant connected this visibility to shifts in the City’s approach:

It’s being taken up by the municipality and as well as being taken up by municipal politicians who . . . don’t have a, like a profound ideological attachment to these sorts of things. But because people like it and because it’s popular and because there’s been a number of successful projects . . . they’re willing to support this kind of project. (David Alfaro Clark, Montréal)

PARK(ing) Day cannot be credited with initiating these activities, but it did provide a useful vocabulary with which to describe them, and that in turn helped to increase their visibility. In Sydney, as noted above, Crawford Architects had not heard of PARK(ing) Day or parklets until well after they installed a garden in parking spaces in Surry Hills.

We started calling these parklets because John [O’Callaghan, who set up the Sydney PARK(ing) Day webpage, Twitter and Facebook accounts] had tweeted us something about them and called it a parklet and I thought it was a much better name than what we’d come up with. Then I later found out that parklets is a kind of a word that’s used for [these]. . . . I think parklets is a really good word because it’s just a little bit of green public space in a street that didn’t really have any. (Sam Crawford, Sydney)

PARK(ing) Day helped draw together a diverse and disparate range of activities in a way that could be explained and understood. Importantly, PARK(ing) Day captured a range of increasingly pressing issues in a single, highly shareable image:

I just remember being struck by how brilliant that was, as a way of illustrating that streets could be used in a completely different way. . . . I was part of this group of people and we were trying to think of like “Okay, how are we going to make these points? How are we going to move policy? What kind of hundred-page research paper should we write?” And these artists in San Francisco, in just one simple, two-hour-long project and a photo, I felt like they had conveyed this entire set of ideas in such a compelling way.” (Aaron Naparstek, New York)

With its strong narratives of legitimacy, PARK(ing) Day was an important factor in gaining public and policy support for the wide range of activities with which the event has been linked. For Crawford, PARK(ing) Day and, particularly, parklets proved valuable in explaining the Surry Hills intervention, and in connecting it to other events and other ideas. In 2008, John Chase, a Los Angeles urban designer who coedited the influential publication Everyday Urbanism in 1998, highlighted the significance of PARK(ing) Day for a much wider range of urban interventions: “the greatest boost to the importance of very small spaces since the first edition of Everyday Urbanism has been the phenomenon of appropriating parking spaces for temporary parks and even proposing that parking spaces be made into micro-parks.”27

As Chase argues, PARK(ing) Day should be understood as an important contributor to the growth of temporary and bottom-up approaches in planning. PARK(ing) Day remains the most prominent example of tactical urbanism. For Merker and Bela, PARK(ing) Day remains a key initiative despite their move to Gehl Studio. While it is now part of a longer story, PARK(ing) Day is still a foundational reference in many of the office’s presentations. Merker explains:

[PARK(ing) Day] stands in as the primary example of [tactical urbanism]. . . . It has allowed a lot of people who had no other reference to talk about doing that kind of thing with a very specific example . . . you know, the mayor of some town or some dorky planner or designer that’s using it to show a client. Even if it doesn’t really live up to all that they’re saying that it does, it provides the example that they can use. So I think it’s been a really useful kind of communication device in the political and design fields.

The particular contributions made by PARK(ing) Day may be hard to pinpoint, but the event should not be dismissed as without consequence. In all three cities, PARK(ing) Day has had impacts on policy, public attitudes, the physical form of the public realm, and, perhaps most significantly, on the way in which cities are imagined and discussed.

7.2 Changing one’s place in the city: commoning

It changed the world [laughs]. I’m kidding, that was a joke. Well, I think it started a very important conversation in cities all over. . . . It was part of the inspiration for the creation of parklets, but my deeper hope is that it really is more about changing people’s perception of what it means to be in a democratic society, to be an individual and take some responsibility and some agency and some action to live out your values. . . . Having the experience of doing it . . . changed I think all of us who were participating. The actual doing of it really made you feel like, wow, this is a powerful thing. (Matthew Passmore, San Francisco)

The shift Passmore describes, from seeing PARK(ing) Day as a way to achieve external change toward seeing PARK(ing) Day more as a source of personal reflection and inspiration, is one that emerged in many interviews. While emotional or affective impacts were less likely to be described as motivating engagement, these proved surprisingly significant for many participants.

It definitely changed your perspective on what’s okay. . . . It’s not necessarily changing anything in the long run to do a PARK(ing) Day parklet. It’s not, I mean a lot of the benefit I see is personal benefit. (Alex Gregor, San Francisco)

Participants often began their engagement with PARK(ing) Day with a view to prompting physical and policy changes, and a lack of directly traceable, tangible outcomes was a source of regret for some.

I think that’s a disappointment that people that may have participated in PARK(ing) Day, certainly I felt disappointed afterwards that there’s a lack of any action or there was lack of change. . . . But actually it was more internal . . . than something physical or something on the street. (John O’Callaghan, Sydney)

Reflecting more broadly, beyond the initial goals motivating their engagement with the event, a large proportion of participants felt their involvement had a significant impact on them or their organization. PARK(ing) Day was often described as a turning point, empowering participants and starting them on a trajectory of increasingly significant contributions. The experience of building a park changed the way in which they understood their relationship to the street and the city.

I carry that I did PARK(ing) Day . . . I still sometimes walk the street and look at the street or public realm and kind of envision something else. My little planner mind totally reimagines street intersections on a daily basis. (Anais Mathez, Montréal)

What I found was it was pretty empowering if you make a big enough noise, especially given San Francisco politics, you know, you can be heard. And you can make a little bit of a difference and you can make sure that decent things happen. (Daniel Sherman, San Francisco)

In explaining these shifts, participants describe feelings of empowerment, belonging, and, particularly, feelings of ownership arising out of their contributions to PARK(ing) Day. Through the process of building a park, many participants said that their sense of ownership was strengthened.

The multiple opportunities provided in PARK(ing) Day to develop a sense of ownership are significant for the performance and evolution of legality in the event, with ownership a key predictor of responses by legal actors, and important in revealing the dynamic and co-constitutive interactions between law and society. At a more personal level, the opportunities to develop a sense of ownership through PARK(ing) Day are in many cases the most valuable aspect of the event. By strengthening participants’ sense of ownership, PARK(ing) Day can have much longer-lasting impacts on participants’ understandings of the city and their ability to shape it. In many cases, participants then link this shift to later involvement in related activities.

Jérôme Glad was nearing the end of his architecture studies when he participated in PARK(ing) Day in 2012. Working with a group of young designers, he installed a cinema in Old Montréal, complete with popcorn, red carpet, a high-quality sound system, and authentic vintage seats. Glad emphasized repeatedly the impact that this had on him, how he was inspired by this experience to lead a number of other temporary interventions around other parts of the city:

I think the fact of doing the PARK(ing) Day helped me doing other projects, participation projects, and helped me discover that we could have an impact in our city. It was the first time when I built something for PARK(ing) Day that I realized that I could build things in the city. (Jérôme Glad, Montréal)

In 2013, Glad coordinated the installation of a village éphémère (temporary village), which he described as “a whole street of PARK(ing) Day” lasting for one day and one night. The following summer he organized a similar event, but with a six-week duration, then in 2015 and again in 2016 for the whole summer. The success of these projects led Glad to establish Pépinière & Co, a not-for-profit company dedicated to the development of events like PARK(ing) Day on a full-time basis. Focusing on neglected spaces such as laneways, unpopular public spaces, and underused infrastructure, Pépinière & Co have constructed several temporary projects enlivening and encouraging debate about various parts of the city (figure 7.4). These projects are highly regarded in Montréal, and were mentioned in many interviews as making very positive contributions to the city. Glad traced them all to PARK(ing) Day:

For me, it was a foundational act, to do PARK(ing) Day. It activated things in my life enormously. I remember writing a very long email to a friend about, oh, now it’s possible! We can do things in the city!

Similar stories can be found in all three cities. Rebar itself provides a clear example, with PARK(ing) playing a major role in the group’s move from planning guerrilla installations over beers to professionals running a major design office with international recognition. There are many others. Ming Thompson and Christina Cho, two young architects who coordinated a PARK(ing) Day installation within the architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, were inspired by the experience to establish their own studio. Atelier Cho Thompson now focuses on public projects informed by the approach they took in PARK(ing) Day.

I saw the fun and the potential of doing stuff like that and at some point I started something in my head, yeah. Maybe it led to that, maybe. (Mikael St-Pierre, Montréal)

In Montréal, Mikael St-Pierre and Philippe Letarte, who built a hockey rink in the downtown area in 2012, went on to found Lande, a nonprofit organization that helps communities to convert unused spaces into parks, gardens, and playgrounds. Staff at the architecture and planning office Rayside Labossière were inspired by PARK(ing) Day to design a new kind of street furniture that would provide seating and tables for a wide range of social interactions, and to work with the city to develop a permitting system to enable their installation across Montréal. For the young design studio Atelier MAP, a weekend venture squeezed in between the demands of day jobs with larger firms, PARK(ing) Day provided a valuable opportunity to test and publicize design ideas.28 This proved fruitful, leading to further work, including an installation for the summer-length village éphémère in 2016.

Even in Sydney, where PARK(ing) Day has been smaller, participants have been inspired by their experience to contribute to the city in other ways. After working on PARK(ing) Day within a larger office, John O’Callaghan was inspired to start further participatory planning projects—such as Idea Bombing Sydney, an event series to engage young people in thinking about the city—and in turn to set up his own consultancy. Jonathon Carle went from PARK(ing) Day to installing a bookshare outside his home, and now sits on the board of Street Libraries Australia. Elise O’Ryan and Kris Spann went from participating in PARK(ing) Day to leading the installation of a trial parklet in the inner city suburb of Glebe, including obtaining a grant from the City of Sydney and conducting detailed evaluations to inform the development of a parklet policy for the City, and then later developing a parklet on a trailer base that could be moved quickly and easily around the city (figure 7.5). As O’Ryan explains:

I’ve been involved in PARK(ing) Day for a number of years now and it was short-term action. Now it’s just kind of heading more towards long-term change. That’s kind of cool to have gone through that process.

Participation in PARK(ing) Day can be a transformative experience for groups as well as individuals. An important part of the event is the way in which it draws people together. Glad’s involvement in 2012 was as part of the newly formed Association du Design Urbain du Québec (ADUQ), which has gone on to become an influential and respected organization in Montréal, advocating for the profession and the public realm. Another group in Montréal, the McGill Spaces Project, used PARK(ing) Day as a launch event. This was successful, as director Alan Chen explains:

We blew up a bit after that. Our name gained a lot of traction on campus and that was a really big thing because that was our first year. From there we sort of took off so I think a lot of that success could be attributed to the amount of awareness, that exposure that we got on PARK(ing) Day.

For established institutions as well as newer organizations, PARK(ing) Day can help to strengthen relationships between and within groups. For UTS Green, the sustainability office within the University of Technology Sydney, PARK(ing) Day was helpful in developing relationships.

[PARK(ing) Day] certainly has impacts for us on campus. There’s a camaraderie between all of those who participated. Some of them already are mates before they come and participate but then by the end of the day there’s a certain sort of mateship built up and I’ve certainly noticed just in going around the campus you know, you chat to and you acknowledge people that have participated in the event that you might not otherwise have, so there’s certainly some social benefits. (Seb Crawford, Sydney)

For Safiah Moore, participating in PARK(ing) Day helped strengthen feelings of belonging and connection to Arup as an organization.

I was probably a student or a graduate here, so trying something new was good. And the fact that we pulled it off and there was a lot of support for us to pull it off and continue to be involved, I think that impacted me in a work sense that I was in a place that supported things like PARK(ing) Day, so that kind of affirmed that I was in a good place here. (Safiah Moore, Sydney)

Perhaps most importantly, PARK(ing) Day can be significant in drawing together informal groups. Consistently, participants describe getting to know their neighbors through the event.

Having a day where people are invited to come and be part of their street and do something and just hang out and meet each other . . . I think that’s a great way to start community dialogue or bring people together. And help people feel like they own physically the space as well as be part of their community. I think the concept is so strong. (Sam George, Sydney)

PARK(ing) Day, for many participants, is valued for strengthening feelings of belonging and attachment to the local community, developing a collective as well as an individual feeling of ownership.

I felt like it really brought a lot of people together, I met our neighbors in other office buildings who I’ve never talked to before. And people were coming out and introducing themselves and offering us food and . . . resources, things like that. I thought it was a really cool community bonding event, not only were we taking over the street and showing more creative uses of public space, but it was also a way to really get to know the community pretty well. We met a lot of really cool people that day. (Annalise Reichert, San Francisco)

It was definitely a community-building exercise, and a direct result of that was getting to know some of the issues on our street and issues in our neighborhood and the people that live here, the people that work here. So it had way far-reaching social and community benefits outside of just doing this small little installation. (Trevor Sell, San Francisco)

As an activity that nurtures collective forms of ownership, participating in PARK(ing) Day can be understood as a process of commoning. As a verb rather than a noun, commoning is less about the management of common resources,29 and more the generative potential of commoning as a practice.30 In the context of concerns about the enclosure, dispossession, and ecological crisis being wrought by contemporary capitalism, commoning is celebrated as “a unifying concept prefiguring the cooperative society that many are striving to create.”31

Scholarship on commoning draws in a wide range of examples, from community gardens and housing cooperatives to more transitory and dispersed practices like ad busting and social support networks.32 Some are explicitly counterhegemonic (the camps of the climate justice movement),33 others are much less political (a community of mobile-home owners in New Hampshire that formed a cooperative when their landlord put the site up for sale).34 Many don’t actually identify as commons, and don’t conceptualize their activities as commoning.35

What unifies these activities, and what prompts commentators to describe them as commoning, is “a shared interest or value that is produced through communal relations.”36 Commoning emphasizes the specific and the contextual over the universal, and prioritizes a sense of shared life and collective responsibility over instrumental, individualized rationality. The productive nature of commoning is central: commoning emphasizes sharing for the common good and building new social relationships, beyond the market form.37 Commoning does not simply give effect to preexisting values, it “is also and most importantly a field of production of values.”38

Commoning is celebrated for the way it produces forms of ownership that are more inclusive, more open-ended, and more productive than private property. In some cases, new commons provide the basis for assertions of ownership that constrain and challenge other forms of property: claims by nearby residents and former customers of what was once a department store in Vancouver to resist its demolition and replacement by condos;39 similar claims by residents and activists in Italy over an old cinema building.40 Commons can be understood as thresholds, spaces that threaten dominant taxonomies in the urban order.41 With strong parallels to Sarah Keenan’s analysis of subversive property—an alternative form of property that unsettles hegemonic power relations, perhaps contributing to more equitable and sustainable futures42—Patrick Bresnihan and Michael Byrne argue, “the urban commons thus emerges in response to the particular circumstances not as a form of protest but as a way of materializing an alternative, thereby producing an actually existing crack in the city.”43

The ongoing and performative aspects of the relations involved in commoning are central. In their discussion of a range of alternative social spaces in Dublin, Bresnihan and Byrne describe something very much like an informal sense of ownership, finding that the spaces “first and foremost belong to those who participate in and make use of them.”44 The work involved in maintaining these alternative spaces—gathering materials and sharing labor to repair and convert run-down buildings into useful spaces; holding dinners, markets, gigs, and other events to raise the monthly rent; participating in collective decision-making—is directly productive of ownership. As Bresnihan and Byrne explain, “all of this means that those involved in using and sustaining a given space can feel it belongs to them—a fact which is often immediately tangible.”45

The importance of such ownership is noted by participants; many recognize that “users and participants taking ownership is a prerequisite to their survival and sustainability.”46 Participants also recognize the connection between feelings of ownership and contributions to the spaces. Accordingly, in their own experience of joining one space as new users, Bresnihan and Byrne note that they were “encouraged to transform the space, make decisions and generally take ownership of it.”47

Commoning is an active process, requiring continued acts of renewal.48 A sense of ownership of the social spaces of Dublin empowers the participation that is necessary for the sustainability of those spaces, and it is strengthened through the process of participation. Participation is also productive of the community spaces themselves, the object of ownership. This is consistent across the literature on new commons: in community gardens, climate camps, social spaces and makerspaces, and in many other examples, the process of “taking” and building ownership actually creates the thing that is owned. Commoning is thus significant not simply as an alternative way in which to hold a preexisting resource (collective rather than public or private property), but as a means of producing new commons.

The shared interest or value that is produced through commoning is much like the sense of ownership that so many participants describe as produced and strengthened through PARK(ing) Day: a feeling of belonging connected to identity, community, agency, and power. As in other forms of commoning, the opportunity to develop ownership by engaging in PARK(ing) Day is one of the most valuable aspects of the event.

Being in a PARK(ing) Day installation starts to hack kind of your predispositions and expectations, and so yeah, it does help foster a sense of ownership and the possibility of change, that you yourself with your neighbors can effect this change. (Robin Abad Ocubillo, San Francisco)

Personal impacts tend to come up later in the interviews than external impacts on planning, policy, or public attitudes. Personal impacts were dismissed by some participants as less significant, at least to begin with. Eytan Rocheta, quoted above describing the lack of any lasting change resulting from the park in which he was involved, explained later in the interview that he had focused on external impacts because he assumed that was what I would be interested in. Once he realized that personal changes were also relevant, he commented:

I might have answered some of the questions quite negatively then because it did . . . really make me engaged and you know the fact that it was small and allowed for that ownership. . . . If we’re not looking at the impact it had on others, the impact it had on us was profound.

Rocheta and his friends approached PARK(ing) Day wanting to achieve a specific, tangible objective: a change to the road conditions on King Street. The fact that this was not achieved and, even worse, that the group were directed by the police to pack away their park produced a sense of failure. Yet the event was an affirmative experience in other respects, attracting very positive responses from passersby. As such it was effective in building a sense of agency and ownership that remains significant years later. Rocheta linked his experience in PARK(ing) Day to his ongoing advocacy for greater sustainability in the built environment, and to a number of recent achievements in securing cycling infrastructure.

Typically groups of people (at least two or three) are involved in putting on a PARK(ing) Day installation, so with close to 1,000 constructed in Montréal alone in the past five years, many thousands of people have been involved.

Every year it grows and it finds more and more hidden corners of the world and that is incredible. To see people in Kazakhstan doing PARK(ing) Days is just phenomenal. (John O’Callaghan, Sydney)

The number is much, much higher when including the people who see and perhaps engage with installations and their creators. Potentially, the event could have a very large impact on the ways in which people understand the city and their place within it.

7.3 Changing possibilities: prefigurative practices

It kind of felt like, um, the future. This is like the future that I would like for myself and my kids. You know, it will happen slowly over time. (Jonathon Carle, Sydney)

For many participants, PARK(ing) Day is exciting because of its connection to new possibilities. Many participants approach PARK(ing) Day with specific goals in mind: securing policy or physical changes to the street or city, working toward more trees, safer bike lanes, and more lively public spaces. Through their engagement in the event, however, participants often move beyond these to consider a much wider range of possibilities.

It’s kind of freeing to be able to take over a space that’s usually just used for a car to sit there all day. And it opens space you don’t normally get to occupy because there’s usually a barrier between you and traffic, and so you’re right in the middle of the swirling cacophony of downtown San Francisco. . . . When I walk by there I still think about it that there’s kind of hidden layers of potential throughout the city, including in that place. (Ming Thompson, San Francisco)

PARK(ing) Day can be understood as prefigurative. Prefiguration, a term coined by Carl Boggs, describes “the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.”49

Prefiguration joins “ends” and “means.” Instead of imagining or lobbying for the implementation of alternative urban forms, prefigurative strategies work performatively to put those alternatives into practice, “removing the temporal distinction between the struggle in the present and a goal in the future.”50 Prefiguration has gained increasing attention in conceptualizing contemporary social movement activity, particularly anarchist-inspired politics like Occupy and the alterglobalization movement, but also social centers and free spaces, municipal radicalism and environmental activism.51

In transforming a parking space as part of PARK(ing) Day, participants do not ask city or state authorities to rethink the space allocated for car parking, they do not seek to enter into negotiations about whether or to what extent other uses should be permitted. Participants act as if the space is available for more sociable and sustainable uses, and in doing so both challenge and remake forms of urban governance.

The merging of ends and means in prefiguration is an open-ended and experimental process. In her examination of the alterglobalization movement, Marianne Maeckelberg finds that movement actors do not seek to implement a predefined alternative.52 Instead, they design new power structures through practice: each event is an experiment in communication, coordination, goal-setting, and decision-making within a diverse polity.

This inclusive and iterative character is particularly important, Maeckelbergh argues, given the diverse range of actors, aims, and identities involved in the movement, making prefiguration the most effective (and perhaps the only) strategy to bring about social change.53 PARK(ing) Day is comparable to the alterglobalization movement in this respect: aside from a desire to rethink the way in which space on city streets is allocated, there is no singular objective, adversary, or identity that is shared by all participants.

The ends that are imagined are shaped and reshaped through the process of their enactment in prefigurative practices. Intended consequences may fail to eventuate, while new possibilities arise unexpectedly. Social change is cyclical rather than linear, means become ends, which in turn become the means to other ends, and so on. Prefiguration enacts an interplay between theory and practice.

The sentiment expressed by Jonathon Carle above, that participation in PARK(ing) Day felt like creating the future, is consistent with the descriptions of other participants. For many, the process of creating a pop-up park can generate new understandings of the city and its potential.

It’s quite exhilarating I think . . . because you’re disrupting something out of the norm that people may not be expecting to see. (Lucinda Hartley, Melbourne)

PARK(ing) Day prompted Hartley and her collaborators in the placemaking consultancy CoDesign to look for other loopholes in the regulation of street space. Finding that licenses for the storage of refuse containers were cheap and easy to obtain, CoDesign created a more durable, but still temporary, public space inside a skip bin (prompting media reports about “skipster hipsters”).54 Carle himself moved from PARK(ing) Day to street libraries, and he continues to imagine new possibilities beyond these:

Sometimes I think it would be good to have a pedestrian crossing, you know, at the school. I’m just going to paint one myself [laughs]. . . .

I’ve been eyeing off . . . this super ugly traffic island . . . the idea I had would be to have a formal dinner setting with a white tablecloth and everyone wears a tuxedo. . . . You go along and you do that, and motorists drive past, they’re like “what’s going on?” almost like a public performance sort of thing. The other idea would be to put some beach sand down, so deckchairs and maybe like a little white picket fence around it. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.

PARK(ing) Day is embedded within and takes place in dialogue with existing conditions and concerns. Like other prefigurative practices, it both challenges those conditions and proposes new possibilities, potentially undermining the hegemony of prevailing structures by demonstrating concrete alternatives.55 What makes it prefigurative is the way in which it “produces a ‘critical distance’ that denaturalises prevailing ways of doing things while simultaneously inspiring, crafting and developing alternatives.”56

The space created by that critical distance has been productive in PARK(ing) Day. In all three cities, unintended consequences and unimagined possibilities emerge through the event. Back in 2005, Rebar expected to be challenged by the City of San Francisco, not invited to drinks by an advisor from the mayor’s office. The subsequent collaboration that fed into the Pavement to Parks program was not planned or even imagined by Passmore, Merker, or Bela. The production of feelings of connection, belonging, and ownership, the development of skip bin seating or Rayside Labossière’s footpath furniture, and the establishment of new organizations like Lande, Atelier Cho Thompson, and Pépinière & Co, are among many others.

Some of these are unsanctioned, like PARK(ing) Day. Several, however, work actively with city and state authorities. Most obviously, parklet policies have been developed and even led by municipal authorities in all three cities. Rayside Labossière worked with the city to seek permits for their footpath furniture installation, and to develop these for wider deployment across the city. Rue Publique went from unsanctioned transformations of streets to undertaking urban design consultancies for the city; Pépinière & Co’s projects are largely funded by public grants. There is considerable variation between (and within) these collaborations, and my research did not examine any of them in depth. More research might suggest a critical appraisal, in line with concerns about co-optation and greenwashing leveled at other DIY-inspired activities.57 Yet they could also be read in more hopeful ways, as transforming relations with city and state authorities to produce more inclusive and sustainable forms of governance.

A collaborative approach to remaking governance is apparent in the work of several scholars exploring ideas of prefiguration. Davina Cooper, for example, argues that more progressive forms of governance can potentially be developed through experimental practices.58 Through activities ranging from British municipal radicalism in the 1980s to more recent mock parliaments, the Feminist Judgments Project, and the playful declaration of independence by Brighton and Hove in 2015, Cooper highlights the importance of performance in inspiring, legitimating, and rationalizing new imaginaries. Cooper is particularly interested in playful practices comparable to PARK(ing) Day, suggesting an important role for these in troubling existing understandings and unsettling notions of common sense: “simulation and make-believe, so often trivialized, may prove important registers for exploring what counter-states could entail.”59

Luke Yates makes related claims in his analysis of “free spaces,” autonomous social centers in Barcelona.60 One of the key features distinguishing prefigurative practices from subcultural or countercultural groups, Yates argues, is that the orientation toward the future is not utopian or proleptic, but engaged in the world. The aim is to model and inspire wider change: “When participants said that their actions or experiments were political ‘in themselves’ or that ‘living differently was political’ per se, they nearly always added disclaimers with a pragmatic sense of political impact: they were an ‘example’ to be seen and communicated; people wanted to ‘inspire’ change and diffuse perspectives.”61

The construction of a park for PARK(ing) Day may be a brief and small-scale intervention, but it provides an opportunity to rethink the institutions through which social life is conducted. Significantly, the event presents a different experience to those typically offered to citizens wishing to participate in shaping their cities. PARK(ing) Day suggests a more active role for citizens than as recipients of services provided by state and city authorities, subjects to be consulted in discrete, state-directed processes.

People are not able to understand that they are in charge of the next decision by the Transport Society, the next bus line, the next, you know, the sidewalk could be wider, the sidewalk could be shallower, you can have no parking, that’s possible, streets could be green. PARK(ing) Day ignites that like, “Oh, that all happened, and it happened in 24 hours and was over. Well, what could happen?” And I think that you can’t do that enough . . . [PARK(ing) Day] starts to ignite people’s ideas. (Andrew Dunbar, San Francisco)

Like many prefigurative practices, PARK(ing) Day can be productive in unexpected ways. Through policy and physical shifts as well as the more personal transformations that follow from participation in the event, PARK(ing) Day can be important in changing understandings of what is possible in contemporary cities.

PARK(ing) Day does change people’s perspective. . . . [People] suddenly realize they can have an impact and influence on government. (Daniel Sherman, San Francisco)

PARK(ing) Day can also bring about change even when it doesn’t lead to the particular changes sought by participants. While there is still no parklet on Australia Street, Newtown, the two parks constructed there had an impact on the local council, as one council employee explained:

After that, and because of the process of co-design with the community group and what the parklet would look like, and working very closely with the community to contact the businesses and neighbors, council just went down this road of really investing in co-design, public space and doing traffic management through temporary structures, even just painting the road. So it led to quite a bit of acceptance from within the organization that you can do things differently, and we had multiple workshops when we were designing intersections. . . . So culturally it had a positive impact in our organization.

The experience of building a park can have a powerful impact on participants, and perhaps also on the state and city authorities with which they engage. PARK(ing) Day provides an opportunity to contribute directly and materially to the city, to physically enact something different, and in doing so both challenge and demonstrate alternatives to current conditions. As an open-ended, prefigurative practice, PARK(ing) Day can be productive, often in surprising ways.

7.4 Undesirable impacts?

Most critical evaluations of PARK(ing) Day center on the event’s lack of direct, tangible consequences. For those who set out to achieve specific policy or planning shifts, PARK(ing) Day can be disappointing. Some participants went further, particularly when considering the event alongside other forms of DIY urbanism. While the scale and duration of PARK(ing) Day might limit its impacts, one cannot assume that these are unquestionably positive, and certainly not for everyone. As with other DIY interventions, differences in intention and the socioeconomic position of those involved can be significant.

With greater prominence, DIY urbanism is attracting scrutiny as well as celebration.62 The strongly unequal social and economic context in which interventions like community gardens, parklets, pop-up shops, and restaurants take place has been a key source of concern.63 DIY and “tactical” strategies are being adopted by commercial interests, government agencies, and professional planners.64 Instead of furthering a right to the city, the deployment of pop-ups by businesses and by cities seeking to increase their competitiveness can have the opposite effect.65 Unsanctioned interventions, as Margit Mayer argues, can be “harnessed by clever city officials and (especially real estate) capital as branding assets that contribute to the image of ‘cool cities’ or ‘happening places.’”66 The effect of DIY urbanism might then be to fuel real estate speculation, further marginalizing people and places with less cultural capital.67

DIY urbanism can be adopted by officials in pursuit of other agendas too. With state and municipal authorities increasingly stretched after long periods of austerity, infrastructure improvements by citizens, communities, and businesses can be vital. For Fran Tonkiss, the adoption of community gardens and other grassroots initiatives as part of wider neoliberal strategies for outsourcing municipal services to private actors means that “the distance between seedbed and sellout becomes very tight indeed.”68

Participants were not generally concerned about co-optation by commercial interests in the context of PARK(ing) Day. Rebar’s prohibitions on advertising have limited the commercial use of PARK(ing) Day, but small businesses have often participated. Some larger businesses have also been involved, though less directly. In 2008, IKEA provided materials with which the lifestyle and fashion blog PopSugar constructed a park, along with a $1,000 gift certificate to be offered as a prize to PopSugar’s readers.69 Then in 2013, a park constructed entirely from IKEA products appeared as a double-page spread in its catalogue, and videos of the installation could be viewed on the IKEA website. While the catalogue did not refer to Rebar or to PARK(ing) Day, the text made a clear connection to the PARK(ing) idea.70 Highlighted in orange, a caption at the top reads: “Even if you live in a city, it’s easy to create a great outdoor living space in an instant. Just don’t forget to pay the parking fee!”

The small scale and short duration of PARK(ing) Day means that participants tend not to be troubled by this kind of engagement. Some even saw it as positive, providing much greater visibility:

IKEA probably had a much bigger impact [than us] because it was seen by tens of millions whereas our YouTube video might be seen by a couple of thousand and you know on the street, by a few hundred or a few thousand . . . [IKEA] made more people aware of PARK(ing) Day. (Eytan Rocheta, Sydney)

In discussing the connection between PARK(ing) Day and parklets, a few participants did note that many are associated with businesses, providing extra seating for café patrons, but emphasized the requirement that parklets are public spaces that cannot be restricted to customers (and the requirement that parklets display a sign explaining this). It was this public element they linked to PARK(ing) Day, in constrast with earlier, more commercially oriented forms of outdoor seating. Participants also mentioned parklets without a commercial element: the green parklet built by ’Deep Jawa (designed by Jane Martin, and notable for its topiary dinosaur) outside his home on Valencia Street; the educational parklet built outside Buena Vista Horace Mann School by the Exploratorium and Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco, with funding from the National Science Foundation (figures 7.6 and 7.7).

Participants were more concerned about politicians and government departments using the event as a way of sidestepping their responsibilities. One of the very first parks built in 2005, after Rebar’s November installation but before the development of PARK(ing) Day, was by the Santa Monica Parks and Recreation Department. For Rebar, this was problematic, as Passmore explained:

I’m thinking, Well, isn’t it your job? How can you protest not having parks when that’s what you do? You know what I mean? Can you join our side and look back and go “Yeah, more parks,” like who are you pointing at because isn’t that supposed to be you? We’re pointing at you.

Across San Francisco, Sydney, and Montréal, local and state government agencies have participated many times in subsequent years. Another participant was critical of the way that PARK(ing) Day has been supported in San Francisco:

I became skeptical about it . . . it was too sanctioned by the city. . . . This is a critique. And so you can’t adopt this as your project when the whole point is to make you aware that there’s not enough park space in this town. And then they get the people to solve it once a year by creating these little park things, and they were just too token. . . . It just has added to the parades and the celebrations of San Francisco. (Amy Seek, San Francisco)

In Montréal, some participants worried that politicians were keen to be associated with the event, but not to undertake any substantive change.

Nothing changed. So last year I wasn’t very optimistic about doing a second PARK(ing) Day event. But I’ve been asked . . . maybe because it’s trendy, I don’t know . . . from a borough to another, also there seems to have a competition. . . . [But] I don’t see any evolution. The director or the politicians, they still use their cars. (Sylvain Thériault, Montréal)

Politicians, they like to go in those places to show themselves and say, yeah I’m for viable mobility, and next day they use a car, they give money to highways . . . we don’t want PARK(ing) Day to be just a funny moment, just greenwashing . . . and then it’s okay, we forget all our message. (Félix Gravel, Montréal)

Concerns about who is involved in DIY urbanism extend beyond corporations and the state. Scholars including Megan LaFrombois, Kimberley Kinder, and Gordon Douglas have called for much greater attention to the range of people who participate in informal city-making practices, highlighting the degree to which DIY interventions are structured along class, race, and gender divides.71 Much like other forms of environmental activism,72 participants tend to come from a position of some privilege. As one participant commented:

You know, you’re probably not going to be thinking about urban design, public space improvements if your neighborhood is full of crime, if you can’t even afford to live there, if your schools are bad. There’s a certain way in which this type of work is a little bit of a luxury. (Aaron Naparstek, New York)

The deep entanglement of ownership with other forms of privilege means that PARK(ing) Day, like other forms of DIY urbanism, is most often undertaken by people with some form of capital—cultural if not financial—young professionals, small businesses, “could haves.”

The influence of PARK(ing) Day on wider city-making processes makes the privilege of its participants an issue requiring careful consideration. If the infrastructure upgrades and policy amendments that participants secure through PARK(ing) Day are prioritized over changes in other parts of the city, might they exacerbate patterns of disadvantage and exclusion? Or might they contribute to processes of gentrification, providing a symbol or catalyst for real estate speculation while marginalizing and displacing more vulnerable residents?

There are strong parallels between these concerns and the growing literature on green gentrification.73 Urban environmental improvements such as new and upgraded parks, bike lanes, footpaths, community gardens, and tree planting are widely understood to benefit all residents, making cities more liveable and sustainable. Increasingly, however, plans for these kinds of improvements are generating opposition. Critics have noted the class, gender, and race dimensions of city greening, highlighting the role of whiteness and other forms of privilege in determining which facilities are provided (infrastructure for commuters cycling to professional jobs in the city, for example, rather than delivery cyclists; parklets, green alleys, and curbside buildouts in areas that are already leafy).74

Those critiques have in turn encouraged efforts to expand the reach of greening activities, particularly into more vulnerable communities subject to the worst environmental justice concerns.75 Yet efforts to “improve” lower-income and minority communities have also attracted opposition, with residents working actively to prevent the upgrading of amenities and infrastructure.76 Jennifer Wolch, Jason Byrne, and Joshua Newell describe this as the “urban green space paradox”: the creation of new green space to address environmental justice can make neighborhoods healthier and more attractive, but it can also increase property prices, leading to the displacement of the very residents the green space strategies were designed to benefit.77

Like green gentrifiers, participants in PARK(ing) Day might unintentionally (and unwittingly) be fueling processes of exclusion and displacement. While the small scale and short duration of pop-up parks limit their potential impact, PARK(ing) Day is not without consequence. Blaine Merker emphasizes the complexity of the issues involved:

I don’t even know where to start. It’s just such a complex issue. I think it does have something to do with ownership, because the question is, who’s exerting their claim? . . . It shows up how powerful a tool for ownership self-made projects can be, and how charged public space is with creating ownership and signifying it. . . . You just have to be pretty aware of the context as you’re putting yourself out there and asserting that claim on space, that you might be asserting it in a context of other people with claims on the space too.

Despite good intentions, participants in PARK(ing) Day might be adding to the problems faced by communities they set out to assist. With PARK(ing) Day, as with other “improvements” in public space, close engagement with the local context is necessary to understand how (and whether) pop-up parks might contribute to the creation of cities that are not only more sustainable but also more just.

Privilege is perhaps even more important with respect to the less tangible impacts of PARK(ing) Day. As a practice through which personal and collective feelings of ownership, voice, and agency can be sustained and strengthened, PARK(ing) Day can work to shift perceptions about what might be possible and, perhaps most significantly, to shift participants’ understandings of their capacity to effect change in the city. In contrast to official channels for participation in planning, PARK(ing) Day provides an opportunity to contribute directly and materially to the city, to propose and test new ideas instead of simply commenting on preformed proposals. In this way PARK(ing) Day opens up city-making processes, extending these to younger and less wealthy groups of people.

The importance of ownership, however, means that PARK(ing) Day opens up the planning process only so far. If PARK(ing) Day is undertaken primarily by the already empowered, or at least the already relatively empowered, then there is a danger that it might operate to further marginalize those with less ownership, voice, and agency. PARK(ing) Day might contribute to gentrification and displacement less through city greening projects, and more through the empowerment of the more privileged communities who pursue them—and the relative disempowerment of those who don’t. If PARK(ing) Day can strengthen feelings of ownership, and in turn empower participants to contribute to city-making processes in larger and longer-lasting ways, might it also render those without ownership even less visible?

Building a park on PARK(ing) Day can be a moving experience, leading many participants to shift the ways in which they understand the city and their capacity to contribute to it. While participants were often disappointed that their parks failed to produce particular changes in planning policy or urban design, many felt that the event did have an impact. PARK(ing) Day can operate as a prefigurative practice, a form of commoning that nurtures shared interests and identities, opening up new and unexpected possibilities for intervention in the city. The significance of those possibilities is highly contextual, however, requiring careful attention to wider relationships of power and privilege. As in other public spaces, particularly in global and increasingly unequal cities like Sydney and San Francisco, interventions in parking spaces are not neutral. At its best, PARK(ing) Day pushes participants to reflect on the politics of public space. For at least some participants, the event provides an important opportunity to deepen their understanding of spatial politics and of their own positions. PARK(ing) Day presents a vivid example of the degree to which even tiny, temporary interventions in the street connect to wider networks of power and privilege.