Park(ing) Day

Short version

It’s European Mobility Week and Anzir Boodoo asks you to consider ditching the car, and heading along to a Leeds pop up park within a parking bay. This seemingly delightful global initiative takes over a car parking space or two, and replaces cars with music, ping pong and art. It’s on Friday 21st September starting from 12pm till late. Make your way to Leeds City Museum on Cookridge Street

Longer version

I was a little perturbed about being asked to write a piece about European Mobility Week, an event in which (which is not in Europe by any stretch of the imagination). That the UK ranks 21st out of 27 EU countries in participation this year shows the dedication that local and national government have put into promoting sustainable travel.

Invisibility
We expect the “transport system” to function well. Like many other things, it’s something which, when it works well, is invisible. So perhaps our lack of interest in changing the ways we get around cities is indicative of a system that’s working very well, and you can all stop reading and do something else now; letting those of us who attempt to make your mobility in the city and beyond productive, stress-free and seamless take a well-deserved rest in the satisfaction of a job well done. A cursory glance around my offices at The Institute for Transport Studies here in Leeds, the Transport section of any newspaper, and MySociety’s excellent FixMyTransport reveals that I may not be the only one who would disagree with that sentiment.

A walk around town
Faced with the question of why anyone reading Culture Vulture should care about transport in their city, and European Mobility Week in particular, I walked down from my “ivory tower” at the University to Culture Vulture favourite Laynes Espresso, as the Leeds evening peak took hold, The city centre felt unpleasant with traffic fumes, vehicle and pedestrian congestion interspersed at each road junction, and as they headed off home for the weekend, most people seemed, to some extent at least, unhappy. Whether that unhappiness was down to the grinding irritation of peak travel out of Leeds, the general desire to get back home as soon as possible after another hard day, or the grinding irritation of modern life in general is difficult to tell, but there’s at least the sense of some unease with the status quo.

Go on, be self-centred for all I care
Ultimately, everyone is going from one place to another, on their own individual trajectories which combine into the stream of people and buses passing the window of Laynes. Thousands of decisions as to where to live and work, and how to get between the two, are manifesting every instant. Everyone does the best they can, or at least thinks they’re doing the best they can. Habits develop, and people will change what they’re doing only if and when their habits stop working for them. Fundamentally, Transport Planners deal with forces they can’t control, trying to mould these individual decisions into a top down view of the world. The reason why we do this is, somewhat paradoxically, because we believe it will make people’s lives better. People don’t want to be told about things that might make their lives better, by people who don’t know about their lives. Transport Planning is on a hiding to nothing.

For a Brighter Tomorrow
If, even having walked through all the pollution and congestion of cars in Central Leeds, I was to tell you that a Leeds without cars could be better, I would probably get laughed at. The only comfort you might get from that statement would be that my professional colleagues would be laughing harder than anyone else. My former supervisor produced a series of visions of cities with reduced car usage, to show how we might all live slightly differently and travel more by public transport, on foot and by cycle. You may be wondering why we’ve singled out the car for special attention – after all, it was one of the greatest inventions of the late 19th century, and has enabled people to do things which were impossible before.

The fact is, a disproportionate amount of pollution and carbon dioxide emissions in cities is from people travelling in cars, that the expense of running a car takes up a large proportion of the budgets of poorer families, and that the alternatives are often not very attractive. Because of the unattractiveness of alternatives, it’s become difficult to argue the case against cars in cities, but …

Pieces of a puzzle
European Mobility Week was started in 2002 as a project of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Transport and Energy (DG TREN), and is now a partnership between the Transport and Environment Directorates. This might count for many as another reason to ignore it, and especially its climax, In Town Without My Car, a day of showcasing alternative means of travel and their contribution to healthier cities and people.

In 2005, Rebar, an artists’ collective in San Francisco, came up with a completely different and entirely separate idea, but one which essentially turns the EC’s top-down approach of collecting ideas for events from Local Authorities and Transport Authorities on its head.

Parking to Park(ing)
What if, in order to counter the gradual erosion of public open spaces in cities in favour of movement and parking space, we could turn the tide by turning a car parking space into a park, allowing people to claim back a part of their city that was lost to storing a vehicle so someone could go off and do something else. What if, instead of the “dead zones” of car parking in city centres, life could be brought back in, and useful activity could be organised to show the potential of each of those parking spaces which have eaten up city streets.

Rebar’s approach to this was surprisingly simple. Instead of parking a car in a parking space, what if you could park a park? Viewing the metered on-street parking spaces as a short term space rental, they picked a spot, moved in, and Park(ing) Day was born. One measure of a good idea is its diffusion, for example Leeds’ own Café Scientifique has gone on to conquer the world. Last year, 162 cities in 35 countries worldwide participated in Park(ing) Day. There’s obviously something in it which resonates and has kept on growing, to the dizzying extent of San Francisco and New York’s events, reaching festival proportions with over 50 parking spaces and an army of volunteers with cycle trailers moving trees and benches around. It’s a DIY approach to reinventing the city on a massive scale.

Coming to Leeds
In 2008, inspired by watching about Park(ing) Day on YouTube, TINWOLF, the local Transition City group in Inner North West Leeds, brought Park(ing) Day to Leeds to celebrate carfree and sustainable living. It started small, with only 5 of us involved in setting up one space, and a friend generously bringing over all his garden furniture (in the back of a car, as it happened!) and a kettle and camping stove. We enjoyed it so much that the next year, with a far greater number involved, we managed not only to have two parking spaces, but also the renowned folk singer Eliza Carthy came down to play for us, in advance of a gig that evening at the Brudenell Social Club, and on the back of a song on her 2009 album “Neptune” called “Britain is a Car Park”. We played frizbee, ping pong (without a table!), had a play reading, ate biscuits (distributed under an Open Source licence with the recipe), chatted, played music and gave away foraged fruit and skipped vegetables.

In 2010, despite a similarly large number of people, we opted for one space on Cookridge Street, with real turf, thanks to a supporter who was taking up part of his lawn to build a shed. Heroically cycling down from Otley with part of his lawn on a trailer, he finally arrived to applause and we got to work laying the first grass that site must have seen for some 200 years. We enjoyed poetry and games, and a busy, convivial atmosphere which was in contrast to The Light next door, with its almost locked down control of what happens within its confines. At one point, their Security Guards seemed to want to stop us congregating on the street outside, but after a while they all came down one after the other to take photos and a slice of the now traditional Park(ing) Day Parkin(g) – a little local spin on a global event.

Up until then, the weather had treated us kindly, and we’d usually stayed out past sunset in the autumn evening. However, this being Yorkshire, it was inevitable that it was all going to go wrong sometime, and in 2011, in addition to a much smaller group of people on the day, we started late and were thwarted by the weather, eventually packing up at around 6pm in a torrential downpour. We still got nearly 4 hours onsite, very much concentrated on live art, with a spray painter and chalk drawing. As the Leeds College of Art were having their induction, a number of new Art Students (as well as some Medical Students from the University of Leeds) came down to contribute to the chalk drawings, and the wet weather seemed not to dampen anyone’s spirits, at least until the worst hit.
Flash in the pan
A big one day blow-out is all very well, but regardless of how many artists, musicians, yoga classes, picnics, pop-up tea bars or miniature gardens appear and disappear, there’s always the question of what you’ve actually achieved at the end of the day. While in a number of US cities, such as San Francisco, New York and Chicago, as well as Adelaide and Milan amongst others, there have been moves to convert car parking spaces into pocket parks permanently; here in Leeds the support from passers-by, artists, performers and other helpers (which have numbered up to 20) has translated into a much less tangible “legacy”. In each of the cities where Park(ing) Day has had tangible, permanent effects, it has been as the result of years of campaigning and concerted effort for each Park(ing) event, and often as a result of the Park(ing) Day galvanising communities into action to set up multiple parks involving a good cross section of the community, as in New York.

Why Parking?
There is another reason to target parking, one that makes relevant the happy accident that Park(ing) Day, on the 3rd Friday of September, always falls within European Mobility Week. It’s mere coincidence (although that didn’t stop me actually registering Park(ing) Day Leeds in 2008 as an official EMW Event, despite only Local Authorities being allowed to register events (and Leeds and West Yorkshire have registered nothing this year, so we’re not “on the map”, so to speak). In city centres, it is the difficulty and cost of parking a car that is probably the biggest factor in determining whether people drive in. It stands to reason that if there is less parking, there will be fewer car trips, because every car trip starts and ends in a parking space. People can and do find other ways of getting around, and I guess some of you reading this will use public transport for at least some trips to Central Leeds, rather than struggling to find and pay for parking.

Come Along & Get Involved
At the end of the day, it’s a question of what kind of a city you want, and how much you’re prepared to put into making it that way. Obviously, as I’ve been invited to write for European Mobility Week, it’s a fair guess that I’d like Leeds to be less dependent on car travel, and to have a less car dominated city centre with space reclaimed from the car back to the human, a city where we have space to relax and create as well as shop and eat and drink. This is, in a way, not so much a Call to Arms as a question to all of you reading this

What I have done over the last 5 years is try and create a buzz around one day, joining forces with people all over the world who also want a more peaceful playful and inclusive city to think about what we could do with each and every part of it. If you consider the potential of a few square metres of tarmac that you probably always ignore, it puts a different spin on the public space of the city and its value. Park(ing) Day in Leeds only happens because I share this vision with other people in the city, and they are also committed enough to do something rather than just talk about it. Yes, we’re a long way behind the Americans with their amazing displays of local talent and creativity, but that’s not for the lack of such things here in Leeds, but for the lack of our ability to get together and make things happen, then see an idea through from from an interesting thought to starting to change the way we live.

This year’s Park(ing) Day is on Friday 21 September. We will be meeting from 1200 outside Leeds City Museum on Cookridge Street, in order to find parking spaces on Cookridge and Rossington Streets. We aim to stay all afternoon, so if you can’t help us set up, drop by and say hello!

About Anzir
Anzir Boodoo MILT is a Postgraduate Researcher at The Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, studying the perceptual impacts of the built environment.

He has a Masters of Research in the Built Environment, and has worked as an academic studying railway timetabling, as a Consultant Transport Planner, and on a number of transport policy and campaigning projects from grassroots actions such as Park(ing) Day to appearing in Parliamentary Committee during the Eco-towns Programme and at Public Inquiry into the former Regional Planning Guidance for Yorkshire and the Humber. He is Policy Officer for West & North Yorkshire for The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (UK) and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Mobility Agenda and is on the Committee of Carfree UK, an organisation promoting carfree housing development and carfree living in the UK.
He is also interested in urban space and its uses, as part of the Make-Pla(y)ce collective making play in public space in Leeds, a participant in a number of flashmob events and games, helping Occupy Leeds and has worked with Urban Designers from Leeds Metropolitan University and with YORnet at the Royal Town Planning Institute. He is also a Peer Reviewer for the International Seminar on Urban Form’s “Urban Morphology” journal, and administers the mailing list for Planners Network UK, an organisation connecting local community campaigns to academics and progressive Planning professionals who see beyond the simple development agenda. His work takes him up and down the Otley Road on foot and by bus.