Combining Pavement and Reusable Materials to Make Urban Parks

28 September 2009 - 11:00am

Allison Arieff argues that cities should look to reversible parks modeled on the Pavement to Parks program to prevent blight, combat the practice of land banking, and model sustainable practices.

"San Francisco's 'Pavement to Parks' program creates spaces for people by reclaiming excess roadway, through the use of simple and low-cost design interventions. What’s innovative about these parks isn't so much the design as the implementation. As Andres Power, urban designer at the San Francisco Planning Department explains, because there is no structure in place to do something like this 'it fundamentally changes the old impasse of years of planning and just lets the space evolve over time.'"

Full Story: Pavement to Parks
Source: NYTimes: By Design Blog, September 22, 2009
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Instead of demeaning so-called "third world cities", we would do well to observe, understand, and adapt such approach on a much more widescale basis.