The concept of a community-built play sculpture garden that lasts only one year seems to right in step with the Pop-up park movement that is gaining traction around the world. This idea springs up from two motivations. There is a lot of under utilized space in cities and a great need for leisure space.
Big parks and playgrounds are great, but they take a long time to plan, fund and build. The great benefit of doing a fast community generated leisure setting is a great way to test the need and viability of making such a large investment. Done with a thoughtful process it is also a way to gather community input; a notoriously fraught and frustrating process.
San Francisco recently started “Pavement to Parks” projects that reclaim unused city owned space and turn them into public plazas quickly and inexpensively. In New York folks are just grabbing chairs and taking over the sidewalks or, when it’s cold, creating an indoor park. And in London they are even creating pop-up art parks.
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For more on Pavement to Parks see
By Allison Arieff on design and architecture.
New Yorkers take shelter from winter in a downtown pop-up park
By Alex Davies, TreeHugger
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/92/new-yorkers-take-shelter-from-winter-in-a-downtown-pop-up-park.html
Also at Tree Hugger:
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