Little Park, Big Impact: A Demonstration Project in South Park
By: Brittany White
For one Saturday last fall, five parking spaces were transformed into a vibrant 1,000 square-foot park during the quarterly South Park Walkabout. South Park Walkabouts attract visitors from all over San Diego for live music, pop-up vendors, and special deals at local shops and restaurants. With a micro-grant from Better Block, a non-profit organization specializing in tactical urbanism, local community members designed, permitted, and built a pop-up parklet for the event in under ninety days.
The Concept and Process
The parklet occupied the parking lane of the entire width of one block in central South Park. Only the parking lane was closed, so the street was still open to vehicle traffic, facilitating a simpler and less expensive permit process. The temporary configuration narrowed the existing overly wide vehicle right-of-way to a standard width and still left enough room for a 10-foot wide parklet. Raised wooden flowerbeds outlined the edge of the parklet and separated park-goers from the adjacent traffic. Inside the parklet were benches and Adirondack chairs, yard games, standing tables, crafts, and space for a local Girl Scout troop to host a bake sale booth. Crosswalks were enhanced with traffic cones that formed temporary curb extensions, doubling the pedestrian landing space at each adjacent corner.
For several years, there have been whispers of ideas for implementing placemaking and street safety enhancements in South Park – installing painted street murals, expanding public space, and temporary street closures for events. This demonstration was designed to be a catalyst to turn those whispers into real outcomes. Because future goodwill from the City would be necessary to implement broader placemaking improvements, event organizers applied for a special event permit, undergoing a 60-day permit review process and gathering sign-off from more than 10 different City departments.
Lessons Learned and Looking Ahead
In a space that would have normally served as storage for five empty vehicles, the parklet entertained approximately 400 people over the course of the five-hour Walkabout. Meanwhile, an estimated 3,000 people benefitted from the traffic calming improvements, including families with small children, people on scooters, bikes and skateboards, and people walking and crossing the streets. Throughout the evening, space in the children’s craft area was shoulder to shoulder, packed with parents, children, and dogs. Compared to typical conditions and other Walkabouts, vehicles slowed down significantly through the corridor and the two adjacent intersections. Pedestrians were easier to see, even at night, and cars stopped to allow people to cross the street. Feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive, with requests to implement a park permanently, to close the whole block in the future, and to bring about more neighborhood safety and placemaking enhancements.
Building on the success of the first demonstration, the parklet will be back for the spring Walkabout this March. Local stakeholders are evaluating potential locations and strategies to implement a permanent parklet in South Park. For now, local business owners and residents have volunteered to streamline the permitting and building process of the pop-up park during Walkabouts and other neighborhood events. As capacity for community-led improvements continues to grow, more placemaking and streetscape projects are forthcoming.
In planning, it is rare to imagine and implement a project in just a couple of months. It is possibly even more rare to propose the elimination of parking and receive an overwhelmingly supportive response from community members and businesses. With under $3,000 in materials and just two to three months of coordination, demonstration projects have minimal impacts on a project’s schedule and budget, but they yield significant results for community buy-in, capacity building, and ultimately implementation.