From one parking spot to 100 public parks: The history of San Francisco’s street transformation

What began in 2005 as Park(ing) Day evolved into part of a global movement for transforming city streets.

In 2005, a San Francisco collective of artists and designers called Rebar ignited a global street intervention, which later became known as Park(ing) Day.

“We observed that 70% of the right-of-way was allocated to vehicles, while only 20% or 30% was for people on foot or bike,” said John Bela, one of Rebar’s founders. “That just seemed like an imbalance.”

The group decided to reclaim a small piece of the road. On a sunny weekday morning in November, Rebar members fed a downtown San Francisco parking meter and set up a temporary park with grass, a bench, and a young bay tree. There the park remained for two hours until the meter ran out. They rolled up the sod, packed away the bench and the tree, gave the spot a sweep, and left. “When people sat down on the bench and began having a conversation, we realized it was a success,” Bela recalled.

Rebar wasn’t the first to reclaim San Francisco streets for pedestrians. Artist Bonnie Sherk had introduced portable parks under freeway overpasses and alleyways in the 1970s. But in 2005, the idea took off. Flooded by requests from other cities, Rebar published an open-source how-to manual empowering others to create their own installations. Many people were eager to see cities change, and Park(ing) Day allowed them to take this process into their own hands. Park(ing) Day is now an annual open-source global event, a day when people take back parking spots to make spaces for people in hundreds of cities all over the world

Read the full article on Fast Company

Author: Alison Sant

Recommended by Stephanie Cheung