International Park(ing) Day Friday 17th September

All those workers who trudge down Collins Street in Hobart to work each day, or who cycle along it in increasing streams, will see cars kicked out of parking spaces on Friday 17 September in front of Inspiring Place near the Rivulet. Instead of cars, there will be coffee served by popular barista, Anja Boot, with turf benches and citrus trees comprising a user-friendly art installation created by Hobart visual artist Bec Stevens. “It’s a rare chance to park yourself instead of a car. On a small scale, it’s an opportunity to reinvent how we live in Hobart’s CBD,” Inspiring Place director, John Hepper said. “What we’re doing is fun but it’s also a wake-up call to say that it’s time to rethink how our city has been planned, designed and built to serve cars when it should serve us.”

Friday September 17th is actually International Park(ing) day, following a trend to green parking spaces for the day that started in 2005 in San Francisco, and will this year be celebrated in Australia, and for the first time ever, in Hobart. This greening of the city streets will see bitumen give way to public spaces of extraordinary variety – temporary turf, chairs, umbrellas, chess games, art work, tea parties and lounge chairs. Brisbane City Council has embraced the concept, which sees individuals and organisations pay the parking fees for an urban space for the day and then occupy it as an implicit protest against the car invasion of our public places. This year Brisbane will have over 50 car parks converted for the day top public space.

The parking pictures:

In 2009, more than 700 car parks in 140 cities in twenty-one countries on six continents took place. The founders of Park(ing), REBAR Group Inc., call the event an open-source experiment in reclaiming public space. It has become an annual, one-day global event during which individuals and groups transform parking spaces, parking lots (and other areas of the landscape built to store stationary motor vehicles), into places for people to congregate, socialize and play, to the exclusion of motor vehicles (any of these transformations is a “PARK(ing) Day Installation”).

REBAR is an interdisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of art, design and activism, and is all for extending the pedestrian zone into parking spaces. Their work encompasses visual and conceptual public art, landscape design, urban intervention, temporary performance installation, digital media and print design. They remix the ordinary, repurposes the ubiquitous and restructures the fabric of the urban environment by exposing hidden assumptions and shared meanings embedded in the everyday experience of the built world. Their quest is to transform excess roadway into public plazas, pocket parks and experimental sites for new forms of urban infrastructure.

Of the 140 cities that took part in Park(ing) in 2009, Brisbane came 3rd in the international rankings, with over 50 parking spaces turned over to people’s parks. Street greening is a growing trend in cities even with the density of New York City. The NYC Greenstreets program was launched in 1996, and has been rolled into sustainability blueprint planning for the city, which is aiming for increasing public access to open space. Spaces being reclaimed for greening include paved areas, vacant traffic islands and median strips that are being filled with shade trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and groundcover.

But green streets don’t just have to be about greening places for people, place and artistic expression. They can be functionally green, by integrating urban design, transportation systems, watershed health, parks, open spaces, and infrastructure systems as they do in Portland Oregon. Portland has adopted a green street strategy to manage storm water runoff, to enhance community and neighbourhood livability, as well as to strengthen local economies. The strategy integrates with pedestrian and bicycle planning and safety programs, whilst more effectively managing storm water and increasing the city’s green spaces and therefore public health and amenity.

Perhaps the ultimate in street greening was achieved in Paris in May this year when cars on the Champs-Elysees were replaced by grass, 150,000 plants, flowers, trees, sheep, pigs and cattle, on 8,000 plots of earth for over a kilometer from the Arc de Triomphe to the Rond Point. The huge natural installation was the brainchild of street artist Gad Weil as a celebration of nature in the capital to coincide with World Biodiversity Day. Over two million people walked the avenue in the hot sun over two days in a spectacular celebration of nature that cost the City of $US5.3 million. Indeed Paris is showing how a major city can pursue sustainability in a manor that is not only visually arresting but underpinned by significant environmental planning.

Inspiring Place have started what hopefully will become a Tasmanian trend. “We want to ensure that Hobart is recognised as part of a global community that’s willing to face the challenges of how a city can become more liveable,” John Hepper said. The Park(ing) lounge – created from natural materials including hay bales, 25 citrus trees, and other plants as part of emphasising the need for sustainability – will open from 8 am-5 pm outside 208 Collins Street. Designer Bec Stevens has a keen interest in engaging with public space and exploring ideas about its use. Students from the University of Tasmania’s School of Art will participate in the ‘coffee lounge not cars’ interactive installation. This visual impact may be just the kick along that is needed in our cities for real change.

The installation will be outside 208 Collins St, Hobart.
For more information on ‘coffee lounge not cars’ contact John Hepper on 0419 305 539.
For more information on PARK(ing) Day 17 September 2010, see www.parkingday.org. Last year, more than 700 temporary parks were created in more than 140 cities across 21 countries.

For more information and cool photos see: http://parkingday.org/ and
http://www.rebargroup.org/; http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/ and
http://www.brisbaneparkingday.com/index.html and
http://www.ourbrisbane.com/whats-on/freebies/4353256.parking-day; and
http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/trees_greenstreets.html; and
http://www.portlandonline.com/BES/index.cfm?c=44407

Photos of Park(ing) 2009 in Brisbane available at: http://www.ourbrisbane.com/suburbs/gallery/parking-day-2009