Park(ing) Day is com­ing around again and this time there’s some offi­cial sup­port. Welling­ton Sculp­ture Trust is call­ing for expres­sions of inter­est to join them on the day. The clos­ing date is August 12th (sor­ry for the late post­ing on this), so get those idea machines cook­ing. There are a total of 20 loca­tions that will be set aside specif­i­cal­ly for this, as far north as the Rail­way Sta­tion and dot­ting down to Swan Lane on Cuba Street. My pre­vi­ous loca­tion at Low­er Cuba picks up 6 spaces and may actu­al­ly look a bit like a prop­er shared space when it’s all set up.

Allocated park(ing) spaces

There is a fair bit of infor­ma­tion to read through (PDF) before sub­mit­ting a con­cept. Some costs can be recov­ered, but there are rules to fol­low and an oblig­a­tion to have the park in place from 8am until 8pm regard­less of weath­er.

Why would you want to do this? Besides being a fun day out, it’s a great way to get peo­ple think­ing about pub­lic spaces and how we inter­act with the street. On-street park­ing is a sacred cow (Coun­cil­lor Mor­ri­son, you aren’t help­ing) and we need to have the dis­cus­sion about how park­ing affects urban form and the peo­ple on the streets, which is sort of what Coun­cil­lor Paul Eagle is say­ing, even if what he means is slight­ly dif­fer­ent. Streets are all about inter­ac­tions and we need to move beyond our zero-sum-game men­tal­i­ty. Cre­ative use of one car park can bring much more val­ue than just a few car­loads of peo­ple.

Know­ing that Park(ing) Day has its roots in the fringes of legal­i­ty, it feels weird to see it wrapped in offi­cial­dom and sup­port­ed by Welling­ton City Coun­cil. Hav­ing parks vet­ted and select­ed seems a bit sani­tised. How­ev­er, we need to get peo­ple to take inter­est in reshap­ing Welling­ton for the future. 20 well-designed parks in high pedes­tri­an areas will be much more effec­tive than a sin­gle sub­ver­sive park, regard­less of polit­i­cal wash­ing.

Of course, noth­ing is stop­ping any­one from tak­ing some oth­er space in a less offi­cial fash­ion. Just be safe about it.