By Kristin O’Donoghue
Usually, the strip of pavement outside the Bodo’s on the Corner is reserved for parked cars. Last Friday, that space was filled with bright green turf, spiky potted ferns, students in lawn chairs, and a three-foot tall Connect Four game.
The set-up was created by UVA’s Student Planners Association to celebrate Park(ing) Day, an international day of advocacy in which environmentally minded groups convert parking spaces into mini parks, or “parklets.”
Park(ing) Day is a “global, public, participatory art project,” and serves as a day on which people across the world convert parking spaces into tiny parks and places for “art, play, and activism,” write the artists behind the project on the Park(ing) Day website. The event has been observed on the third Friday of each September for the past 16 years. What started as a guerilla art project has evolved into a global movement to reclaim urban space and engage in urban transformation.
By participating in Park(ing) Day, SPA hopes to “raise people’s awareness of how much public space has been taken over by automobiles, and offer an alternate vision for what can be done with the space,” according to Alan Simpson, workshop director of the Student Planners Association at UVA.
Simpson, an urban and environmental planning student in the university’s School of Architecture, says thinking about parking is key if Virginia hopes to become more green.
“There is too much focus on making more space for cars by expanding highways and building more parking lots,” he says. “Virginia should disinvest in auto-centric development, and instead invest in public transportation options such as commuter rail, light rail, and bus rapid transit, in addition to enhanced infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists.”
Activists say that consequences of auto-centric development include increased pollution, the expansion of environmentally damaging urban sprawl, and more injuries and deaths for pedestrians and bicyclists.
According to the Park(ing) Day creators, the phenomenon of parklets exploded during the COVID pandemic, and the group decided to develop a manual for those seeking to create their own installations.
“All over the country, almost overnight, parking spaces and streets have been transformed into places for people,” Parking Day co-creator John Bela wrote in The Dirt.
According to Simpson, the Park(ing) Day event was a “huge success,” as the installation got a lot of attention from passersby, and the club, which has about 30 members, added a few new recruits.
The next big item on SPA’s calendar is the 15th annual 100-Mile Thanksgiving potluck for urban and environmental planning students and faculty. All the food will feature recipes using local ingredients sourced from within 100 miles of Charlottesville. In the meantime, they’ll be parked close by.
