A PARK in a carpark to promote a book celebrating creating PARKs in carparks!
Last Sunday was the launch of the Brisbane PARK(ing) Day Book, celebrating 5 years of PARK(ing) Day in Brisbane and it's influences on our city. The launch was part of the UR{BNE} Festival in May.
The First edition of the book sold out at the event, but you can buy the second edition online at Blurb.
The launch was a great experience for co-organiser Yen, to actually create a PARK for the first time. We created the PARK at the location of the first one in Brisbane, outside Urban Grind in Paddington.
The PARK was simple just some artificial turf (kindly loaned from RPS), some stools and traffic cones. After setting it we instantly had some Urban Grind customers sitting on the grass, in the shade, drinking their coffee. You could see what a difference having space like this in front of the cafe would bring. Rather than the cafe being covered up by parked cars (which may only cater to the convenience of 1 person for the whole day) it became an extension to the cafe and drew in more life from the street. This sort of installation creates a more vibrant, human-scale of street life and also brings in more business for the cafe.
About 1 hour into the park the Council/RACQ traffic response unit stopped by. They had received a complaint! The officers were very nice and politely asked if we could move the turf in by a foot and keep our traffic cones where they were, but only if we didn't mind. Of course we obliged to such a polite and easy request. It barely impacted our PARK at all! I also offered to give the officers my number in case someone called again, but no one did. It's like this even on PARK(ing) Day - generally there is no trouble and if you are requested to do something, then you do.
Of course this PARK was just to promote PARK(ing) Day and the book. The real PARK(ing) Day will be on 21 September this year and we invite Brisbane, once again to join in and change parking in our city.
We must thank and acknowledge Rebar Arts Collective from San Francisco who came up with the concept of PARK(ing) Day and continue to support it with their great international website - http://parkingday.org/
Last Sunday was the launch of the Brisbane PARK(ing) Day Book, celebrating 5 years of PARK(ing) Day in Brisbane and it's influences on our city. The launch was part of the UR{BNE} Festival in May.
The First edition of the book sold out at the event, but you can buy the second edition online at Blurb.
The launch was a great experience for co-organiser Yen, to actually create a PARK for the first time. We created the PARK at the location of the first one in Brisbane, outside Urban Grind in Paddington.
The PARK was simple just some artificial turf (kindly loaned from RPS), some stools and traffic cones. After setting it we instantly had some Urban Grind customers sitting on the grass, in the shade, drinking their coffee. You could see what a difference having space like this in front of the cafe would bring. Rather than the cafe being covered up by parked cars (which may only cater to the convenience of 1 person for the whole day) it became an extension to the cafe and drew in more life from the street. This sort of installation creates a more vibrant, human-scale of street life and also brings in more business for the cafe.
About 1 hour into the park the Council/RACQ traffic response unit stopped by. They had received a complaint! The officers were very nice and politely asked if we could move the turf in by a foot and keep our traffic cones where they were, but only if we didn't mind. Of course we obliged to such a polite and easy request. It barely impacted our PARK at all! I also offered to give the officers my number in case someone called again, but no one did. It's like this even on PARK(ing) Day - generally there is no trouble and if you are requested to do something, then you do.
Of course this PARK was just to promote PARK(ing) Day and the book. The real PARK(ing) Day will be on 21 September this year and we invite Brisbane, once again to join in and change parking in our city.
We must thank and acknowledge Rebar Arts Collective from San Francisco who came up with the concept of PARK(ing) Day and continue to support it with their great international website - http://parkingday.org/
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