Pandemic-era Street Spaces: Parklets, Patios, and the Future of the Public Realm
john bela john bela

Pandemic-era Street Spaces: Parklets, Patios, and the Future of the Public Realm

On a clear fall day in 2005, a group of friends and collaborators from the art collective Rebar commandeered an 8-foot-wide by 20-foot-long metered parking space in downtown San Francisco. This two-hour guerilla art installation evolved into Park(ing) Day, a global public art and design activism event that has been celebrated every year since. In 2009, Rebar and other design studios were approached by the City of San Francisco to prototype a more permanent version of Park(ing) Day. In response, we created one of the world’s first parklets (we called our version walklet). By early 2020, San Francisco had created 70 parklets in every corner of the city, and the City’s parklet program had become a model for cities around the world…and then came the pandemic.

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