ITSRG partnered with students enrolled in Environmental Policy Issues, a course offered by the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University, to mount a Park(ing) Day space on North Broad Street last Friday. The students in the course planned and executed the event. ITSRG has supported the project dissemination through maintaining a live blog of the event on our Twitter feed last Friday and continuing to integrate feedback into the project blog found at: http://plantyourpark.tumblr.com.
Park(ing) Day is a once yearly event that has a simple premise: organize people to plant a one-day-only park in a metered parking space, preferably in a visible and high traffic locale. The aim of the event is to raise awareness about the implications of our automobile driven lifestyles and the quality of urban spaces. The day has expanded to become an international event from its grassroots start in San Francisco in 2005.
Our investigation of web activities related to Park(ing) Day reveals that very few universities explicitly engaged the event. We are aware of the University of Kentucky's GreenKY event because they followed ours via our Twitter feed and blog. We have also found information about the event organized by architecture students at the University of Southern California through their blog post. Students are clearly deeply connected with spaces that were created all over the country, however we found it interesting that little attention to their involvement per se is rising to the awareness of academic departments and researchers. We would love to catalog other events that students created in connection with their academic courses of study and student organizations, so please email us with your links.
We suggest that there are at three themes that provoke interest in Park(ing) Day and other web-disseminated environmental campaigns like it for the academic and organizing information technology, education and geographic communities.
First, Park(ing) Day illustrates the power of viral campaigning that characterizes web 2.0 dissemination approaches. Nearly 70 cities participated, with multiple parks created throughout via the assistance of what is now the National Park(ing) Day organization. This illustrates the rapid increase in attention to the event that has been generated within the blogosphere. Interestingly, our local official organizers encouraged us to implement our site as a "guerilla" park because we only recently connected with them when classes started in September. Given that just three years ago, the entire event was uncoordinated by local and national organizers, we found their suggestion to work outside of the organizer and city-defined parameters quite intriguiging.
Second, Park(ing) Day represents the state of the blogosphere in terms of the connections between different social media to promote the event and call attention to parks created. Flickr photos are fed to national and local organizer websites, and individual parks garner attention from both mainstream and independent news media.
Third, the geographic implications of the event are also noteworthy. Because flickr photos can not only be geotagged but also geo-rssed (is that really a word now?), one can discover parks that were created well after the event occured and in concert with other photographs about unique locations situated nearby.
Finally, one gains an appreciation of the degree to which organizing is being reshaped by the blogosphere and interconnected web 2.0 technologies. Our stats related to this event include not only the thousands who drove by our highly trafficed locale, the hundreds who walked by, and the dozens who spent real time in the park throughout the day - but also our Twitterers followers, the news reporters who appeared because they followed our Tweets, their audiences, our student participants and their social networks, and our broader BITS and ITSRG program participants and their social networks who track us on our blogs regularly. We suggest that the magnitude of our individual event, along with the National phenomenon, illustrates that web 2.0 and interactive mapping tools exponentially increase the numbers of people and range of their interests exposed to these activities, while simultaneously illustrating vastly different levels of engagement in the ideas and substance of the event.
Michele Masucci
Caroline Guigar
Temple University
Jonathan Otto, Cartographic Intern at ITSRG created the map below of Green Spaces in Philadelphia along with Philly Park(ing) Day 2008 sites, shown in red. Our site was chosen because of the relative lack of parks and open spaces off campus in North Philadelphia.
13 Comments
Peter Chomko
9/25/2008 01:40:42 am
In his Stuff White People Like blog, humorist and cultural critic (to use both terms rather loosely) Christian Lander sarcastically sings the praises of ‘raising awareness.’ Tongue held firmly in cheek, Lander defines ‘awareness’ as ‘the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.’
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September 26, 2008
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National Park(ing) Day shows that with a little work positive things can be accomplished. Within a few weeks, our
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On Friday, September 19th, our Environmental Policy class participated in Philadelphia Parking Day. Our class split into different groups to create a green space in a parking space on Broad Street. I decided to join the advertisement group. Our purpose was to garner as much attention as possible for the event. For the first few classes we brain-stormed about different ways that we could get people around campus to come see the green space. We decided that we could reach people through list serves, e-mails and flyers. We distributed flyers to different locations on campus, including the Student Center, class buildings and dorms. Overall I think that our ideas were good.
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We all contributed to making our park(ing) space what it turned out to be, but I think that Maria, Tim and Chris need extra acknowledging. Without Maria's efforts our green space would not have been green at all. Maria was able to track down plants that were lent to us free of renting charge. Also I think that Chris and Tim's handiness needs to be recognized as well. The raised garden and the table and stools added dimension to the space and made it very aesthetically pleasing. I was surprised at how much can be done, and done well, when everyone contributes a little bit.
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Maria
10/1/2008 04:48:33 am
The turnout of our space for National Park(ing) day was surprising. When the event was first introduced to us, I was skeptical. I thought maybe there was a reason the event isn’t very big in Philadelphia. After all, we have a HUGE Fairmount Park and some little neighborhood parks scattered around. Let’s admit it, we’ve got some great parks around the city. Before planning even started, I introduced the idea to a friend of mine, who wasn’t a big fan of the idea. “I would be pissed… if I was looking for a parking spot and there was this ‘thing’ there for no reason,” was the gist of his response. Once planning started, though, I was more optimistic. We were all developing our own purpose toward the event. Some focused on the need for parks in the city, and others shifted focus toward the need for the city to become more sustainable by becoming greener. With a new sense of purpose in tow, I saw the whole event in a new light. Pulling the event together was easier than expected. With everyone contributing, it didn’t seem like anyone had too much work and there was no panic that’s usually associated with pulling together an event: no last minute rush, no chaos, nothing. Just calm and advanced preparation....
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Lindsey
10/1/2008 07:25:36 am
The park turned out so much better than I thought it would. I think the class overall did a really good job of working together and integrating our ideas to come up with our final products.It was really neat to see the whole process come together and I think the turn out was amazing.
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It doesn't take much to convince people of the need for more green space in a city like Philadelphia. Although Fairmount Park is quite a monumental and massive space, it is very far removed from most of the city, particularly from North Philadelphia. Creating a greater awareness of the need for more of this public green space and demonstrating how easy it is to make small contributions is relatively easy, as we were able to demonstrate through Park(ing) Day here at Temple University. No doubt, it is a noble cause and something that people all over can do with considerably few resources and time.
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Graeme Dean
10/5/2008 10:46:33 am
I, too, must admit that when the idea of National PARK(ing) Day was presented to us, I was seriously skeptical. I do not consider myself an activist; admittedly I can be very apathetic. I was almost certain that we would present a mediocre park given the short timeframe we had to work with. However, I was willing to give it a try, and it seems like everyone else in the class was as well.
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Graeme Dean
10/5/2008 10:51:35 am
Tim and Chris deserve an awful lot of credit for making our table, planter and stools. Maria and everyone who brought plants (I know Shelly and Lance did as well) were integral to the success of our green space. And Jonathan's work with the maps is a beautiful addition that adds a very professional gloss to the whole project.
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David Pirko
10/6/2008 02:33:10 am
One more moment past
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Turquoise Martin
10/15/2008 04:30:36 am
While I was not able to physically attend National Park(ing) Day, I certainly was there in spirit and had been a walking advertisement for the event prior to its renowned debut. I was very proud of what the park became and proper credit needs to be given to those class members and others that actually set the stage for our sustainable disobedience in, what I call, the wee hours of the morning.
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8/27/2012 06:56:40 am
I liked your blog and went ahead and created a weebly blog too!
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