On a sunny November in 2006 near the corner of Mission and 1st st in San Francisco someone fed a typical parking meeter. It was the coin drop that would be heard around the world. You see the coin was not meant to park a car but instead a park. REBAR a creative landscape design group had the idea to get people thinking about parking spaces and their wastefulness. “What if we parked a park in one of those spaces instead?” And the idea was born. In only 2 years the concept was replicated in over 200 cities around the globe. Park(ing) day is just another way that communities are forming with the help of the Internet. Just try and organize something so large scale in 1990. You could not do it with a 20 million dollar budget, but today with something as simple as a website and a PDF how-to manual, a good idea can grow around the world. Whats better is the concept is bringing people together and getting them to think differently.
Makes me wonder what other spaces can be rethought if only for a few hours to help bring communities together.
I spent the afternoon sipping Jamba juice with my kids sitting on some grass in a parking space…. Yeah you read right sitting in a parking space. Today was Park(ing) day and the Sacramento team did a great job this year putting together an awesome park.
This is the kind of stuff I am talking about when I say that I want us all to build true, earthy, raw, community in the heart of the city. It’s good people getting together and doing something out of the ordinary just to get people thinking about better ways of doing things.
Also head over to Jessie’s Blog for some pictures of today’s park.
Being at the park reminded me of Jason and all that he did to contribute to making the world a better place. The park was named Presley Park in honor of Jason. It’s still very sad not having him around.
Just a quick reminder that tomorrow is Park(ing) day. The whole thing makes me miss Jason a lot, he did an incredible job last year putting it together and making sure it was an authentic gesture towards a better world and not just another gimmicky sales pitch. I hope we are able to do it justice this time around.
Here is the post I stole from Walkable.org since Eric is a better writer than I am, and I wanted to make sure nothing was lost in translation. I look forward to seeing you there!
Across the world this Friday, there will be several hundred fewer car parking spaces and just a little more park space. Concerned people from around the globe will be converting car spaces into mini-parks—many with sod, benches, games, etc.
Here in Sacramento, we will be creating several spaces across the grid. I’ve created a webpage that has all the information you need to know about our local efforts. Visit it here. On the page, you will find park locations, contact information, information for Facebook, photos from last year’s event, event flyers, and more. The park I’m involved in organizing will be located at J & 20th Streets in Midtown. The park will be named Presley Park in memory of Jason Presley who was incredibly instrumental in bringing together last year’s amazing park.
For those of you in other cities, I encourage you to check the PARKing Day Headquarters website to see if there’s a park in your community. I had so much fun last year that I’ve decided to spend the whole day in the park this year. It’s one of my favorite days of the year! That game of chess pictured above was not staged, by the way. Two strangers just sat down and decided to play!
Do you feel that too much of our urban land is dedicated to automobile uses? Do you think we need more park space in Sacramento? Want to help reverse these trends for a day and have fun doing it? Come join us at the kickoff meeting for Sacramento PARK(ing) Day 2008 next Monday! Conceived by REBAR, a San Francisco-based art collective, PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks. For more information, visit http://www.parkingday.org/
This year, PARK(ing) Day is on Friday, September 19–meaning we have less than 2 months to plan for our park(s). Please join us at the kickoff meeting onMonday, August 11th at 6:30pm at 1215 22nd Street in Midtown Sacramento.
Last year, we created two very successful parks with hundreds of visitors and bunch of media coverage. We also had an amazing group of people that helped organize the parks. Two of the lead organizers have left Sacramento to attend school in another city. And one of our organizers, Jason Presley, passed away earlier this year. Jason was such an inspiration to everyone he came across, and he deeply cared about an eco-friendly urban environment (or eco-urban as he called it).
In memory and honor of Jason, we plan to call our parks “Presley Parks.” We know that if Jason was here this year, he would be able to pull together everyone and create an amazing park. Since he won’t be with us, we desperately need your help. Even if you’re not able to make this first meeting, please let me know if you are interested in participating. You can also join our Google Group for planning and meeting updates: http://groups.google.com/group/sacparkingday
Just thinking about Park(ing) Day makes me sad that Jason is not going to be here with us this time around. But that same emotion is driving me to go after it and make a really good park in Jason’s honor.
I realized when thinking about this that I am not even sure who all came together and made it happen last hear with Jason. He was so good at things like that, that I hardly heard about how it all came to be.
If you want to get together and make it happen again this year send me an email and let me know. It’s on September 19th and I think we should start planning for it soon.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about goodness and smallness and the relationship between them. Probably a response to several points of stimuli: our ongoing explorations in unit sizes, the “Wow!” I experienced looking at the amount of beauty, life and creativity that got packed the space of a parking spot at our temporary park on J Street, and the whole “less is more” aspect of eco-urbanism. So, I’ve started a kind of mental treasure hunt for examples of small things that are just really, really good. Here’s a few along the more elemental nature…
A Pinch of Salt.
We see this all the time on recipes and I’ve always wondered if that pinch really makes a difference. I mean, its just a pinch, right? But I recently had a boiled egg without that pinch and, whoa, won’t do that again. Small amounts of the right ingredient carry a lot of flavor mileage.
A Seed.
We just cut down the three cherry tomato plants in our raised beds that sprawled out to cover a space of 10 feet by 15 feet and were about 5 feet tall (and still growing). It was truly baffling to remember the tiny seed that I poked into the soil last spring, not to mention the buckets of orange and red fruit we pulled from its vines over the last 2 months.
A Book
Like this one in our library… Its still hard to beat a book for efficient design and the profoundness of its impact as a technological innovation.
A Kind Word.
So this will inevitably come across sounding really cheesy… but have you ever had just the worst, mess of a day… and then someone came along and said one nice thing. It wasn’t anything elaborate: no speech, no shiny plaque or award came with it. In all likelihood, it was just a simple statement– four of five words someone dropped in your day like a cherry blossom (another “small = good” example). It may even have been something really trivial– in my case, someone told me I have nice teeth… huh? –but it can just re-frame your whole perspective. Suddenly the mountain of mess melts and you regain your personal dignity and your footing for the day. Cuz’ heck, you’ve got nice teeth.
Mitochondria
I know… sudden jolt there… the touchy-feeliness just needed some counter-weight…
Anyways, these microscopic organisms (pictured above) are generally referred to as cellular power plants… so you could say they are the power source behind every living thing in this world… that’s a hefty impact for something that is 1-10 micrometers in length. And they are an example of endosymbiosis, which is just a cool word to know and a cool concept to think about, especially relative to “sustainability” and eco-urbanism.
Incidentally, mitochondria offer a lot more along the eco-urban parallel line of thought…such as their uber-dense matrix design…
Bigness as a Concept
I think our cultural value for “bigness” is quickly losing social capital, at least I hope some of the trends I’m seeing point toward this… its a needed shift if we’re going to make our cites better and live healthier lives.
Of course, I don’t want to come across as discounting “bigness” completely. I just think a redirection of energy is required. What I’d like to see is a channeling of our love of bigness away from “things” and towards “dreams” and “actions.” But even this isn’t always necessary… I”m thinking of the (oft-used, albeit still true) Helen Keller quote:
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble. — Helen Keller
Then again… I don’t think Helen could have become what she did without some big dreaming… one doesn’t redefine blindness for the world without some seriously large inner vision.
This is an email that was sent to us by Nancy Mathison who was one of the coordinators for National Park(ing) Day.
It’s 5am and completely quite in downtown Sacramento except for the sound of sod being rolled out. While volunteers are biking in sod, carrying over trees and umbrellas, and making last minute print-outs for the day, Jason looks into the glaring lights from the Good Day Sacramento crew as he welcomes hundreds (if not thousands) of Sacramenteans to come out to play in the park!
At around 7:30am, a 10 or 12-year-old boy waiting at his bus stop to go to school runs over to the newly rolled out park to see what’s going on. Jason asks him what he thinks would make Sacramento a better place to live. His response: “One of these parks in every parking spot in the city.”
Throughout the morning, people stop by to read the paper, enjoy their coffee, or wait for their carpool.
At lunch-time, the park is beyond full capacity, as people crowd in the park to eat their lunch and enjoy the reprieve from business as usual. People chat, mingle, and make new friends. Two complete strangers even strike up a game of chess… our plan has worked! By now, the bulletin board clamors with responses to “what would make Sacramento a better place to live.”
Around 3:00pm the musician comes to set the tone for wrapping up the day. People lounge around, enjoy the mellow music, and play with Dante (a co-workers dog) as the day comes to an end.
When six o’clock rolls around and the park begins to disappear, Eric is literally almost in tears, and I start getting pretty cranky too! As we walk away from the space, we reminisce about the day’s events and come up with creative ideas for next year. None of us will ever be able to look at the 22×4 1/2 foot space at 14th and J quite the same way again.
In case you didn’t know, the city gave us an encroachment permit for the day, and were very supportive of the event. We could not have asked for a more positive experience!
Go to Good Day Sacramento to see a short video. Type in “Activists” in the video search box.
Its 2:25 am and my 7 month old daughter decided that its a good time to practice her vowels… Thankfully she is not crying at all, but for some reason she has no interest in sleeping. So I’m standing here looking around the Internet for something interesting… I found this amazing article about Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov a Soviet colonel who basically changed the world as we know it without our knowledge. Although I doubt any of us will have a chance like the one he did to make such a monumental call on behalf of society, we all in our own way have a call to make only instead of a nuclear war being at stake its the quality of life for us and our children.
It’s almost as though the war that Stanislav helped advert placed a sort of complacent cloud over us as a country. I would never wish a war or mass death on anyone but something very distinct is defining our generation in America. The absence of struggle for our basic needs keeps us in a place where we are complacent; we no longer have to strive for anything in life and in turn care less and less about what our world looks like. I had a conversation with Micah as we ate lunch at the Bread Store yesterday about how intense times bring out a sort of accuracy and awareness within us. It’s almost as though we are woken up from a sleep we never knew we were in, when things get hard or challenge us.
I think that each of us has a chance to make a difference. To be the one that woke up and said I’m going to do something about all this. Just like the many who showed up at the National Park(ing) Day yesterday to say that we are not just going to stand by silent as so much land is devoted to parking cars. Not that sitting in lawn chairs on pieces of sod as cars passed on J St is going to make a difference in itself, but its a start. Everything has to have a start. Rosa Parks didn’t have to get 50,000 signatures on a petition to start a revolution she just had to sit down and make a statement.
I spoke with a friend the other day who told me jokingly that he stopped reading our blog because it was challenging him. Although he was being sarcastic I think he is right that it’s uncomfortable to think about doing something or to even notice that something needs to be done. Complacency runs deep and is often one of the hardest things to fight against.
So when the world is telling you that this is the way things have to be, stand up, or sit down, ignore protocol do whatever it takes to be the small catalyst that stopped a war or started a revolution. I can tell you one thing I have learned in the last year is that there are plenty more people out there just like you and the more of us there are the easier this will be to get started. I read a study that said the biggest changes in society start with less than 1% of the population. We are way past 1% and have good reason to get together and make our cities into great places for people to thrive.
This is what LJ Urban is doing every day. We are fighting against the world that says that people wont buy houses in neighborhoods that aren’t new, or that no one wants a sustainable home. We are choosing to make a stand and build a better house in neighborhoods that deserve a second chance. But we realize that we are only part of the picture. What these houses need is revolutionaries to live in them and make a difference in the world around them or simply people who tune in to the discussion even if they will never live in one of our houses. We don’t want to talk about us, we don’t want to scream at cars from a billboard about how our houses are better than the other guys. Instead we want to get everyone thinking about what they can do. Our homes represent a small part of the bigger picture. The real bigger picture is you and what you are going to start doing tomorrow to make the world a better place.
Alright… it’s now 3:10 and the baby is sound asleep. I better lay her down and try and get some sleep myself.
Wow. Working with this eclectic group of eco-urbanists on National Park(ing) Day has been crazy fun.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to bring “fresh air” to the city (both literally and figuratively) and doing this has been that “fresh air” for the dedicated group of volunteers working on this. We hope our efforts produce the same effect on passersby and visitors.
In case you are just tuning in. Here’s what we’re doing.
Wednesday, Nancy and Lindsey, the event coordinators hosted our final meeting at their house. We got Zelda’s pizza (thanks to Eric with Walkable Neighborhoods) and set up a “mock” park in the space in front of their house in order to play around with the layout.
After it was laid out, we all kind of shocked by how much you can actually fit in a 22’ x 7’ metered parking space. Hopefully, this will be the same reaction from people who come visit our park tomorrow!
There’s been some amazing progress in the last couple of days… we’re getting sod (and we have a local downtown resident we’re donating it to afterwards). We got benches and umbrellas and tables and chairs and a chess table. We’ve got a live musician coming to play. The Tree Foundation donated 12 trees (including one’s with blossoms on them!). And, of course, our “Sit Here and Dream Big Signs” which we hope will inspire people to think creatively about this city.
To make things a little more interactive, we’ll have post-its and a bulletin board and we’ll ask people to write a quick thought answering the question “What do YOU think will make THIS city a better place to live?” After everything is over, we’ll be typing these out and sending them to key city influencer’s… who knows… maybe one of your ideas will get in the right hands and actually spark a change for the better!
We’ve got fliers which will be distributed tonight in Midtown/Downtown.
And the news is spreading…
We also finally got in touch with the right people in the city, and they quickly helped get all of the key people together in one room to rally around this event so there shouldn’t be any complications. I have to give props to Bill Thomas with the Developer Services Division and Howard Chan, Parking Services Manager, both of who stepped up and made the process of working with the city easy and fast! Its been great to see people working for the city banding around the event!
Of course, what will really make this event a success will be to see lots of people enjoying the park throughout the day.
