Parklets are tiny parks carved out of sections of streets previously reserved for car parking.  Urban innovators in San Francisco's Mission district applied the concept to the city in 2005 after receiving approval from the city to replace a parking space with a landscaped seating area adjacent to their business.  The city agreed with the provision the space must be open to the general public, and a fresh concept was born.  Today there are numerous other parklets in San Francisco, and the idea has spread to other cities including Los Angeles and San Diego.

The Rationale for Parklets in Los Angeles

According to the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, which answered the widely chorused call for an implementation toolkit on parklets by published Reclaiming The right of Way, the city of Los Angeles falls behind many of the cities on the West Coast in park acreage per resident.  This is particularly true of the city's large lower income districts, which also has a high rate of obesity and limited access to healthy foods.  This lack of access to parks and open space figures prominently in the need to create public play areas, so-to-speak.

The Economic Feasibility of Parklets

The most popular civic reason for building parklets in large numbers is their low cost and effectiveness.  Adding whole parks and other large public space inside cities is often costly or just impossible because of dense development.  In the case of parklet construction, decking or other semi-permanent materials are used to build out to a width of a parking space and the length of a few parking spaces.  Accoutrements like seating, tables, and recreational features are normally installed; often, bike parking is built into or adjacent to the parklet.  The whole process is simple in that it doesn't reconfigure either the street or the sidewalk but adds to the public domain in an appealing way.  Furthermore, maintance costs are fairly low because of their semi-permanent nature and small size, as well as the partnerships with adjacent businesses which benefit substantially from being in their midst.

The History of Parklets and Tactical Urbanism

In an age of limited public funds and heady beaurecracy, tactical urbanism is the new way of installing great, ready-made urban planning amenities in cities around the United States.  Parklets are a recent phenomenon but originate from earlier trends in urban place-making which sought to utilize dead space like road medians and edges, freeway caps, and parking lots.  Like parklets, these spaces were free to use, more or less, and were highly leveraged to create beauty out of nothing.  The actual building of parklets in previously uninitiated cities can be done on a pilot-program basis, thus bypassing a lengthy public approval process.  A municipality and its constituency can try out what is for them a new idea and see if it works, without the commitment of funds or political capital.

Parklets and Tactical Urbanism in New York and San Francisco

In 2005, an art and design studio in San Francisco called Rebar created an installation for two hours in a single car parking space.  The idea took hold in San Francisco and by 2009, the city's first pilot program was launched involving the transformation of a previously unused triangular space where Castro, Market, and 17^th Streets intersect.  The space actually had an urban precedent in the conversion of New York's Times Square into a large public space as a result of The Big Apple's 2008 Pavement-to-Plaza program.  The opening up of this large space to the public in the middle of the city where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersect with several perpendicular streets was a low-cost solution involving the use of pavement markings and movable furniture. 

The Popularity of Parklets Across North America

Numerous cities across the U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, and the world have taken notice of the real-life examples of tactical urbanism in iconic locations in New York and San Francisco and asked for information.  Mainly because of the broader implications for the future of urban public policy, the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs published a research booklet – toolkit for implementing change.  The city of San Francisco responded to calls for documentation on its process and published a paper in early 2013.  In the few, short years since parklets began being built, they have popped up in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Dallas, and the California cities of San Jose, San Diego, and Oakland; and in other North American locales including Montreal and Vancouver in Canada and the Mexican city of Puebla de Zaragoza.