making space in the city: new blood

A strategy for utilizing marginal land around Toxteth, Liverpool, through the installation of benches.

A market and massive “continuous” picnic held to show how urban food production and public space can be combined advantageously in central London.

The city of Turin saved 30,000 euros by using sheep to mow lawns at three public parks. In Pasture in the City, cows were also used during the experimental first year, but because they produced too much manure they have not returned. Traffic is diverted for the herd of sheep to enter the city. After the animals are rotated through fenced-off parks for two months, they return to the Alps for the remainder of the summer. The sheep aerate and fertilize their temporary pastures.

A very short-term lease of a downtown parking space allows the autonomous creation of public space. PARK(ing) involved feeding a meter on San Franciso’s Mission Street to rent precious urban real estate for installation of an aquarium, a public bed, a brothel, or nothing at all, to increase available space on a car-dominated street.An Astroturf park was chosen and installed for two hours, providing an additional 2,230 square-metre-minutes of recreation space-time on a Wednesday afternoon.is a collective based in San Francisco who works within the domains of environmental installation, urbanism, and absurdity. PARK(ing) Day now occurs once a year around the world, usually on 19 September.

Toronto’s Urban Repair Squad grew tired of waiting for municipal authorities to create adequate bicycle lanes and began to install their own DIY infrastructure, encouraging others to take action. Found on: http://cca-actions.org/about

The Austrian civil engineer Hermann Knoflacher developed the Gehzeug, or walkmobile, in 1975 to allow a pedestrian to approximate the amount of space taken by a motorist. It is ideal for protesting against the primacy given to automobiles in the city, or just taking a walk in traffic. Knoflacher’s experiment has been repeated in cities from Austria to Thailand, illustrating the spatial possibilities of urban areas without automobiles.Hermann Knoflacher is a transportation engineer in Vienna. He has been the director of the Institute for Transport Planning and Traffic Engineering at the Technical University of Vienna since 1985.

In Designs for the Real World, Azra exhibited video, photographic documentation, diagrams, maps and quotations to show the behaviour patterns that make up the market and to suggest interventions. Azra put forward a way of keeping the market that would allow for self-organisation. One intervention she suggested was a system of 'provocateur poles', which would offer an infrastructure for accessing water, electricity and so on while also encouraging the shops to cluster in these areas. This would then free up other areas for leisure activities and parking. The exhibition included a prototype of one of the 'provocateur poles'.