It has been a busy morning across the city centre with the opening of the Beach Road cycle lane extension and the annual celebration of Park(ing) Day. This year most of the park(ing) day activity has been focused on High Street/Lorne Street. Here are some photos. Please add a comment if there are other events happening across the city. More photos will be added later in the day.
PARK(ing) Day is a annual open-source global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public places. The project began in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in downtown San Francisco.
So one gazebo was erected for this event?
Must be a slow day in transport.
Your comment makes no sense?
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ParkingDay2015%20%23auckland&src=typd
Citizens of the concrete jungle briefly taking time out to turn tiny little spaces into………suburbia! Except the trees are in pots, and the grass is fake. Well, at least they are trying 🙂
Err no, they’re removing the vestiges of suburbia from the city!
Good on you! Hopefully it helps to make people at the council hurry up and realise that Lorne st and High st need to be turned into shared spaced.
Was/is there any advance publicity of this sort of “happening”?
Ted F,
There wasn’t any advance notice that I know of, but why should there be? The event relies on proximity, friction and the stumble-upon nature of walking or cycling in a dense urban built environment. Probably thousands of people enjoyed these parklets without having to plan an intentional excursion from their usual day to get to them. Isn’t this the basic social and geometric promise of a city?
That said, every time Park(ing) Day rolls around, it serves as notice for the next year — which at least is a useful time-frame for people who might want to organise a parklet if not only visit one.
There was publicity, if you move in the right circles I guess, e.g. http://cyclingchristchurch.co.nz/2015/09/11/parking-day-friday-18th-sept/
But, as someone else said, it’s as much about passers-by stumbling upon the various initiatives all day rather than having a big planned “event”.
Hi Ted F. If you’re interested in events like these you can always follow TransportBlog (or GenZero, Greater Auckland, Frocks on Bikes, CAA etc) on Twitter or Facebook. There are events like this happening all the time.
Nice idea, but what exactly is an “open-source” event? Does that mean you can’t organise it via an iPhone?
Perhaps it was open sauce
Open source means you are free to make whatever you want of it.
You can:
– do nothing
– use what someone else has made
– make something yourself from it.
like home made marmalade.
Silly people gunna do silly things I guess.
Checked these out yesterday. Plenty of smiles from passers-by and people enjoying the spaces. Well done to all those who gave up their own time to make other people’s experience of our city just a little bit better for one day