If you read today’s StreetBeat you may have heard - POP.Park finalist entries will be included in a workshop at the upcoming Conflux Festival. Conflux is an annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.

At Conflux, people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures come together to re-imagine the city as a playground, a space for positive change and an opportunity for civic engagement. It’s the perfect place to talk about Park(ing) Day and POP.Park.

Friday September 18, Park(ing) Day, T.A. will host an interactive, mobile workshop to discuss Park(ing) Day NYC, POP.Park and other creative ways to re-define our streets as places for people and not just cars. T.A. will lead a tour from the festival to the POP.Parks - set-up at a secret location in the city. (check back soon for more information)

This year’s Conflux Festival starts on September 17 and runs through September 20. Join us in building the dialogue about NYC’s valuable public space and how we choose to use it. For more information, schedules and a complete list of participants, go to http://confluxfestival.org/2009/.

I woke up last Saturday morning to the sound of helicopters buzzing around my neighborhood like mosquitoes. Loud, nagging, the sound seeped into the inner sleep and forced me up. I had to be up anyways, I work for Transportation Alternatives and the day was the first of Summer Streets – when a portion of Park Avenue is transformed into a car-free panacea.

I quickly got dressed, up, and out. Turning the corner of Ralph and Patchen I realized that the reason the helicopters were buzzing was located on my block. On my street. In my hood. Cruising down my block I was thwarted in multiple directions because there was police activity.

I mention this halted commute because it is the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish here. Later in the day I was surrounded by everyone from Senator Chuck Schumer cruising by on his bike, to Jeannette Sadik-Khan, the DOT Commissioner that leads the Summer Streets effort, also on her bike, to a family of home school upper west siders, bikers, segway riders, pedestrians of leisure, and running groups all whom came out en masse.

Our streets are not always livable. They are not always the free passage ways we want them to be. We are not always safe. Sometimes, however, we are. And on a day like last weekend when I got to see that there was a sharp line between me and where I wanted to go, looking at an empty street cut off from tape and the scouring of police officers looking for a criminal who shot a cop and the other side, a empty street protected by police officers keeping all who driver motorized vehicles out.

There is a difference. The difference is in the details.

Summer Streets had dance classes, and water hook ups, and places to sit. T.A. put up a makeshift park a’la Park(ing) Day, using a giant loom weaved into a place to cover asphalt. The idea was simple. What if we reimagined our public space, our parking spaces, into places that we can actually live and be at?

I was held back from advancing in the morning but my bike was my friend. I wheeled around a few blocks and found and opening in the chaos. It seems that for one day – and now 3 in the calendar year – a sea of alternatives to cars can now needle their way through the chaos one empty road at a time.

-ibrahim abdul-matin

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about Park(ing) Day in the context of one of my favorite art works/public space interventions, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates. In the early 1970s Matta-Clark bought up a number of parcels of land being auctioned off by the City.  These small and awkwardly shaped pre-development plots were animated simply through Matta-Clark’s taking an interest in them.  His purchase of the land transformed the so-called remnant “gutterscapes” into new artzones with unlimited potential energy.  Though Matta-Clark died before he was able to actualize his vision for Fake Estates, the project raises all sorts of questions about types of space in the City and what they can (or should) be, and about the very notion of land ownership.

While Park(ing) Day is more in the spirit of sharing than owning, I think the ambition is parallel.  Just as Gordon Matta-Clark challenged New York’s patterns of (over)development by becoming an NYC land owner, there’s something slightly transgressive about parking yourself in a parking spot for an afternoon.  It implicitly questions the supremacy of the car and the time, space and money forked over to perpetuate that supremacy. 

Last year at the Center for Architecture we collaborated with Common Room, one of our 2008 New Practices winners, to create a satellite meeting/public interface space.  Passers-by were encouraged to engage firm members and the day ended up as a free-and-easy dialogue about the built environment.

By Jonah Stern