PARK(ing)
An interesting installation in San Francisco put together by rebar.
While it definitely makes an impression and statement amongst its grey concrete surroundings, the installation also provides real function: people could actually sit down and use it. I’d be curious to see if a real business could be set up with a park-in-a-box that’s rotated throughout the city. Perhaps even as a city service. (This is just idle thinking, as rebar allows reproduction of the installation for non-commercial purposes only.)
Besides offering a mental respite from the crushing banality of empty concrete parking lots, putting people into parks is a potential way of counteracting the broken windows theory which I first read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. And it addresses points that Jane Jacobs raises in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she describes the need for people to be on the street as a way of maintaining community and crime prevention, among other things.