Re-claim public space in your city, turning parking stalls into grass laden picnic areas, temporary art instillations, and other communal gathering spaces. Park(ing) Day 2008 is September 19th, leaving you a little less than a month to pull together your plan to invade the city landscape. Started in 2005 by an interdisciplinary collaborative group of artists, designers and activists based in San Francisco called ReBAR. Their tagline, Re:mix. Re:make.Re:configure.Re:consider, turned a 24 hour take-over of a single parking space in 2005, to a reoccurring yearly event which encompasses hundreds of Park(ing) parks all over the world. In 2007, Park(ing) spots were occupied in every major city in the US, with international efforts in Barcelona, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Brisbane (Australia), Bremen, London, Melbourne, Munich, Rio de Janerio, Sao Paulo, Toronto, Utrecht, Valencia, and Vilnius (Lithuania).



Now in charge of coordinating efforts throughout the United States, The Trust for Public Land (TPL) looks at National Parking Day as a celebration of parks and open space, where everyone is invited to participate. Keeping to the roots of ReBar’s initial Park(ing) Day most of the parks are volunteer run and manned. To see who is in charge of local efforts in your area, check out the contact list on the TPL website. If your city is not on the list, don’t fret, you still have enough time to plan to take over a space of your own and get on TPL’s list of participating cities.



If you are interested in participating and need some ideas to get going, you might want to consider checking out the Park(ing) day How to Manual. There you will find the basics on getting ground cover and basic shade with an important reminder to continue to feed the meter throughout the day. Innovation and out of the box thinking is encouraged, and while it is necessary to keep out of the public right of way and not overflow into the middle of the street that doesn’t mean your park has to be sod and it’s definitely not limited to one space. So put on your thinking caps, pull up some asphalt, and layout the strategy of your park, just don’t forget to put your plan into action come September 19, 2008.