Public Napping Platform
‘Labplatz’ is a public event in Berlin that invites the community to come up with their own ideas for occupying parking spots throughout the city. Among the many cool projects presented on the event’s Facebook page is this pallet-based, semi-private napping platform.
Occupying Spots with Persian Rugs
This installation in a parking lot by Brooklyn photographer and curator Joshua Citarella ‘occupies’ nearly an entire parking lot by placing Persian rugs in each of the spots, undoubtedly confusing drivers.
Transportable Garden on a Trailer
Any parking spot in urban Mexico can be turned into a park and just as quickly reverted to its original purpose with this parklet on wheels by the More Spaces Foundation. Designed by DAS Arquitectura, the portable parklet is built on a trailer and features benches and planter boxes.
San Francisco Shipping Container Parklet
A shipping container forms the basis of this fun little bench/garden combo, installed in San Francisco as part of the Pavement to Parks program. The website, which features a map of the city’s current parklet locations, states “San Francisco’s streets and public rights-of-way make up 25% of the city’s land area; more space than all the public parks combined. Many of our streets are excessively wide and contain large underutilized areas, especially at intersections. San Francisco’s “Pavement to Parks” program seeks to test the possibilities of these underused areas of land by quickly and inexpensively converting them into new pedestrian spaces.”
Urban Dance Floor
Another Labplatz project, this temporary parking spot takeover brings a lot more foot traffic to a car-based urban space than it’s ever seen before.
Ghost Parking Lot
An offbeat roadside attraction since it was commissioned by SITE in 1978, Ghost Parking Lot is an installation at Connecticut’s Hamden Plaza shopping center that took up part of the parking lot with a line of junked cars covered in asphalt. A plaque onsite stated that the project takes “two typical ingredients of a suburban shopping center, automobiles and asphalt, and transforms them into another frame of reference.” The installation has since been removed.
