Easy and cheap: How to make a streetscape better and it's good for business too.
Easy and cheap: How to make a streetscape better and it's good for business too.
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
A couple of years ago, London's Daily Mail got up on its hind legs to laugh and sneer and spray globules of rage at the "pocket parklets" that had started appearing in British cities.
The parklets are structures designed to fit in a parking space on a city street. Commonlythey feature outdoor seating and planters but they can contain anything that takes a designer's fancy. Auckland has had some, on High St and elsewhere, Wellington has some in Cuba St and there are others in this country too.
"The death of driving … by 1000 cuts," raged the newspaper. This was "a war against motorists" who were being attacked with, wait for it, "troublesome wooden structures". Less trebuchet than trellis, perhaps, but troublesome nonetheless.
A man from the "Alliance of British Drivers" said councils "hate anybody using the car or any four-wheeled vehicle". The alliance denies the science of climate change, too. Another man said councils have "blood on their hands" for installing seats and other street furniture because "emergency vehicles [are] unable to go about their businesses properly".
As it happens, there's no evidence for this, as an independent, peer-reviewed study in Australia reported in 2021. Not surprising, really: when councils plan the use of streets, they do think about such things.
The imagination of the designers is the only limit.
The London parklets were the work of a company called Meristem Design. To Meristem's delight, the tabloid's attempted hatchet job gave them a 300 per cent increase in sales. It was 2020, tough times in the pandemic, but the company took on more staff and added a Covid-specific feature of Perspex screens. Orders poured in from all over Britain.
That's also not surprising. A parklet outside a cafe or bar will typically increase sales by about 30 per cent. The car park it replaces couldn't possibly do that.
It doesn't have to be chairs and tables.
Many companies are now designing pocket parklets. Meristem has developed a linked model, with parklets lined up in a row, and has also been supplying schools. Parklets outside the school gates give parents somewhere to wait and keep the cars, with their pollution and road-safety issues, just a bit further away.
Pocket parklets were invented in San Francisco about 15 years ago, although back then city authorities took much the same view as the Daily Mail in 2020. Tactical urbanists redecorated individual parking spaces with Astroturf, shrubs and benches, and they even fed the parking meters to try to keep the wardens at bay.
Didn't work, they still got moved on. But the bars and restaurants said no, wait, this works, and the city said okay, and now there are more than 3000 parklets in American cities, hundreds in London and thousands more in Europe and other parts of Britain.
We should have competitions, every spring all over the city, with prizes for the best new use of a stupid old car park. There's still time to get it organised this year.
New uses for old spaces: the parklet that replaces a car park.
What's not to like?
This article is part of the weekly Design for Living series in Canvas magazine.
