Pavement to Paradise
People Ecology Place, Vol 4 // Imagination, Transformation, and the Promise of Micro-Greening
Do you ever walk along somewhere mundane and imagine it as something different, something amazing?
I am one of those people who finds possibility everywhere. Where most people see a gray and lifeless parking lot, I envision a future urban farm. Where others lament polluted vacant land, I see an opportunity for remediation. These visions might be difficult to achieve in the short term, but I believe in the potential for long-term transformation in the unlikeliest of places.
It’s this belief in land transformation that makes me love the concept behind Park(ing) Day. Park(ing) Day is an international event that takes place one day every September where people imagine possibility in the mundane by “reclaiming urban space from cars, one parking space at a time."
Park(ing) Day started as a guerrilla art intervention almost 15 years ago when three artists set up some trees and benches in a parking space in San Francisco to demonstrate their vision for how a single parking space could be transformed into something wonderful.
After some positive press, they launched Park(ing) Day as an annual event. The event caught on and thousands of micro-designs have been imagined and built over the last 15 years. The form of each mini-park speaks to the issues the designers choose to highlight. Installations might seat people in benches or cafe tables, offer little free libraries and a sense of respite, or create places for conversation and play.
And then there's my favorite version of a Park(ing) space - the planted oasis.
A few years ago I helped to create a planted oasis for Park(ing) Day with my university students. I had assigned this project as our first “design problem” in my Ecological Design course. The students engaged enthusiastically with the project, even if they did seem a little skeptical at first about the overall value of the exercise.
We gathered early in the morning, working together to create an attractive space. The students’ design included a wall of inkberry hollies on the street side for a safety buffer and taller shade trees on the south side to shelter us from the sun. Other shrubs, grasses, and native wildflowers were used to shape the space and anchor the cafe table that was placed on one side.
With our new “parklet” set up, we were free to sit back and watch people’s reactions to our design. In the span of a few hours, the university students were quite surprised to see the joy on pedestrians’ faces as they discovered this new park in their daily walk. The students welcomed the unexpected arrival of elementary school children from the school down the street and hosted friends who stopped by. Meanwhile, I busied myself with recording visits from dragonflies and native bees and butterflies. Even a few migratory birds visited our parklet.
Purists might scoff at the idea of a small city green space like this offering any long-term ecological value, but the research shows that the benefits are more than you might think. Many recent studies, for example, have recognized that the addition of small green spaces greatly improves the diversity of insect and bird species in an urban environment. It turns out that birds and pollinators are especially fond of understory vegetation and also love native vegetation in general.
Meanwhile, we can design a city’s green spaces for specific purposes beyond the creation of pollinator habitat. For example, evergreen trees are much better at capturing particulate matter from the air than deciduous trees; deciduous trees are preferred for providing shade and mitigating urban heat island effect; blooming flowers do more to connect people with what they perceive as beautiful compared to other plantings. In short, not all “greening” is equal. We have to know what we want that green space to “do” if we want to know if it is successful.
And let’s be real - temporary projects like Park(ing) Day only demonstrate what we might hope to achieve. To create urban green spaces that allow for lasting ecological integrity, many of these competing greening goals would need to be deftly designed into one place. Also, projects would require the removal of paving and revitalization of the soil to move toward a pre-development level of ecological functioning.
When I assigned the Park(ing) Day design project, I’m sure my students were skeptical and just going along with it for a good grade. But as we pulled the physical project together, I could see that they were proud to imagine something in their minds, build something with their hands, and work together to make it real. I’d like to think this project gave my students a sense of agency, a belief that they can reimagine the world around them and participate directly in making the change they want to see.
As the day went on, they became engaged and enthusiastic and started asking questions like: What if there was one of these parklets on each block? What if this one became permanent? What if all these parklets we interconnected into a bigger green space?
I’d like to think that they were feeling a deeper sense of real optimism and belief in transformation than before.
And that’s ultimately why I’m so bullish on the value of small, incremental interventions that might seem too limited to be relevant - they encourage us to ask ‘what if?’ and expand our imagination space. After all, if we transform what we think is possible in our minds, we might just be able to bring that transformation to life some day.