PARK(ing) Day Post-Op
September 24, 2009 
12 Comments
Reprinted with permission from the Youth Sustainability Council.
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Last Friday, commuters and downtown dwellers were confronted with an unusual sight on Main Street. Sandwiched between parked cars in front of Starbucks was a miniature park and garden of local produce put there by members of the YSC as part of International PARK(ing) Day.
After being complained about by a business owner, the permit was re-evaluated and revoked. YSC members continued to “park” in one space, plugging the meter while waiting for the issue to clear up. They were eventually asked to leave formally and packed up the park.
Why would anyone want to shut this down?
A different permit next year should clear up legal issues. One participant shares, “It’s too bad we got shut down, but people still started thinking about the value of public spaces and how to make change.”
PARK(ing) Day then:
PARK(ing) Day now:
- “National Park(ing) Day,” MetroSpokane, Sept. ’07.
- “The Revolution Will Not Be Lame-O,” Kevin Taylor, Inlander, Sept. ’09.
- “Pavement to Parks,” Allison Arieff, New York Times, Sept. ’09.
About the Author
As much as i miss my old neighborhood, i don’t at all miss the attitude of many of the business owners.
Especially those who don’t live in the city and don’t care about what is best for all of us.
You may have already seen this via other lists you are on. If not, please take 5 minutes for a short survey on the possibility of a new event here in Spokane, “Summer Parkways”: http://bit.ly/PkwaySurvey
Called Ciclovia in Bogota, Colombia where it originated, Summer Parkways involve the closure of streets to vehicular traffic for part or all of a day. The streets are turned over to people-powered activity: walking, bicycling, in-line skating, and other non-motorized forms of transportation.
The event connects people to their neighborhoods with a variety of activities in a car-free environment. This has been popular in New York City, Portland, Seattle and other places around the world–why not Spokane?
Thanks for the post. I thought parking day was great. We had it down in our east main area across from the Rocket without any conplaints. I guess some people don’t get art, or like anything different, no matter how interesting.
Here is a picture from the east main site –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goribob/3932275134/
John Waite
makegovwork.org
Yes…very “art”ful John. So I wonder what the purpose would be? I wonder why some group would squat in front of a commercial business in a parking space? Is there a purpose? Let’s see…there must be a reason. Did the police come to evaluate? Who revokes permits in Spokane? Or maybe the better question is : who would request/give a permit for a parking spot to be inhabitated by anything but a car/truck.? Or maybe it’s just something to do on a sunny afternoon. Perhaps someone just wanted to be “unique” and be seen? Or somone wanted to copy what’s done in a different city? Or..or ..or…I wonder on what grounds the permit was given/revoked? It just seems so odd… to pick something like this to do…..maybe it’s just me… funny though…….
Dazzeetrader brings up a good point. Was there any dialog between the businesses who complained prior to parking day? Was this spot picked specifically because it was in front of a major chain?
Well, Daisy, the purpose setting out a few potted plants in a parking space for a day is to illustrate how wonderful life would be if all those horribly liberating automobiles could be banished, and everyone was forced to walk wherever they wanted to go. Or if they had a politically acceptable reason for venturing further than a few blocks from their assigned cells — er, quarters — they could use the official, government-run transit system.
Automobiles are antisocial, you see. They allow people to go where they wish to go, when they wish to go there. They also permit them to choose the routes they will travel and their traveling companions, and to live where they wish to live. And that cannot be permitted, because history has shown that if they are allowed such freedoms many of them will abandon the huddled tenements of the city and choose less dense, more private, more spacious accomodations than government planners think they need. Such freedoms undermine the planners’ Utopias and the government’s control over their lives. And no government tolerates that for long.
Promoters of “New Urbanism” (which is really old urbanism, of course) should check out this latest post on Randall O’Toole’s blog:
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=1872#more-1872
I don’t think the idea here is to rail against cars or to harass businesses. The idea is to bring awareness about open public spaces.
Hopefully this awareness leads people to speak up in favor of and design places where the community can interact. Places like community centers, parks, walkable streets etc. Places that make Brownes Addition, Downtown, and the South Hill nice places to walk and or drive through. The counter examples are the areas of Spokane like Division and Sprague that I’m usually embarrassed to show to out of town relatives.
At last count, there are 27 neighborhoods in Spokane. Half or more have Community Centers. More wonderful parks in Spokane per capita than any city I know of. Normally though, “public open spaces” aren’t defined by the asphalt in the street in front of someone’s business. Taken to its extreme, I suppose some might define open space as the air. Spokane has plenty of sidewalks too.
I’d think there are plenty of other ways to bring awareness to community. Division and Sprague are business streets much the same as Amsterdam is here in NYC. It’s where traffic and businesses go to do…….well…business. Not too pretty anywhere but it’s where business gets done. Riverside, Main, Monroe, Courthouse District etc in Spokane qualify as well.
I suppose if a group of people want pretty and quiet, they could move to a smaller city with trees and roses everywhere. I’d prefer that but the feel of a real city would be gone. How does one capture both? Commuter roads….!!! We need em! Ask Kitty! Plenty of those might be used to let a citizen live out a bit and still function in a city that does business. It’s an idea as American as apple pie. Some of my remarks are facetious of course..but some aren’t.
Contrarian,
As someone who has studied New Urbanism, i am rather confused as to the content in your link. Anti-socialist hyperbole aside, the author seems to link New Urbanist studies to a Corbusian take on urban design, when it would probably be more accurate to say that New Urbanist thought, at least in the United States, has substantially more to do with the works of Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier, than it does a Swiss architect who was looking at how to infill European cities that were bombed to near total destruction. Also, i would point to the Garden City movement of the turn of the century more so than to the planning policies of Eastern Bloc nations during the Cold War.
If anything, New Urbanism is seen as an antithesis of Corbuian Modernism in both design and planning.
Also, please remind me why a celebration of people and urban space has anything to do with New Urbanism and/or socialism.
This is New Urbanism:
Congress for New Urbanism – http://www.cnu.org/
Pattern Language (works of Christopher Alexander)-
http://www.patternlanguage.com/
Leon Krier – http://www.patternlanguage.com/
Jon wrote,
“As someone who has studied New Urbanism, i am rather confused as to the content in your link. Anti-socialist hyperbole aside, the author seems to link New Urbanist studies to a Corbusian take on urban design, when it would probably be more accurate to say that New Urbanist thought, at least in the United States, has substantially more to do with the works of Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier . . .”
Oh, sure. Utopian visions, and the theories detailing how to achieve those visions, come and go. At the moment Corbusier is “out” and Alexander in “in.” What they all share, however, is a fundamental misconception regarding the determinants of observable patterns of human settlement, and a certain conceit. The misconception is that there is a set of timeless and static principles which yield optimum patterns. But there isn’t; indeed the optimum pattern is always state-dependent: it is the pattern generated by the particular values of the variables operating at the moment. Since those variables and their values are unpredictable, every algorithmic approach is bound to yield non-optimum solutions.
The patterns that planners, including New Urbanists, deem optimal are patterns that emerged under a given set of informational, economic and technological constraints. Whenever any of those constraints change, the patterns are no longer optimum.
The conceit, of course, is the planner’s conviction that they, having been schooled in the current Utopian dogmas, are qualified and entitled to impose the patterns they favor on communities by force.
“Also, please remind me why a celebration of people and urban space has anything to do with New Urbanism and/or socialism.”
Well, Jon, because “liberating” a parking space is the symbolic banishment of the automobile from the urban scene. And the automobile is the Great Destroyer of the archaic patterns New Urbanists idolize.