Park(ing) Day 2015

The atti­tude around Park(ing) Day has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly since I first got involved a few years ago. Where I was strug­gling with by-laws to work around not get­ting per­mis­sion to set up my space, WCC has now brought it into Parks Week and the Welling­ton Sculp­ture Trust does the logis­ti­cal man­age­ment. On March 11, a total of 22 park­ing spaces were giv­en to 17 instal­la­tions between Vivian St in the south and Bun­ny St in the north. The loca­tions seemed to tar­get high­er pedes­tri­an vol­ume areas, so hope­ful­ly the projects all saw plen­ty of foot traf­fic, with a few extra peo­ple on foot for Walk2Work.

Now I could eas­i­ly run some argu­ment about it being too spark­ly and shiny with only per­mit­ted activ­i­ties, but I real­ly don’t buy into that. I think the event does a great job of invit­ing con­ver­sa­tions about how street space is allo­cat­ed and how it could be alter­na­tive­ly used. Besides, if I’m going to go on a rant about any­thing, it would be about motorists who can’t seem to park their cars around any­thing that isn’t anoth­er car. Luck­i­ly, the giant pil­low was­n’t dam­aged despite the guy’s best attempt at run­ning it over. As it turned out, I think some of the projects did a great job of spark­ing all kinds of con­ver­sa­tions over a range of top­ics. Maybe I’m more chat­ty than some, but I met some won­der­ful­ly diverse peo­ple along the way.

With cam­era in hand and the help of a few cof­fees along the way, it was a great day to take the day off and hang out in the city. The order shown is rough­ly chrono­log­i­cal from my point of view. Sad­ly, one of the atten­dees failed to show and the Ath­field park was on a sched­uled break when I was head­ing down Cuba.

There are a few oth­er pho­tos on my Flickr stream and Google made me this cute lit­tle sto­ry­book thing. If you get des­per­ate for more, there’s some Dom­Post cov­er­age as well.