Park(ing) Day is set this September to eschew the internal combustion engine in favour of intersecting community engagement.

The day, which is being celebrated in Calgary and worldwide, asks participants and visitors to reimagine curbside spaces—namely parking spots—with more pedestrian and people-centred uses of the urban landscape.

From Sept. 20 through 22, parking spots along Kensington Road will be closed to make space for artists, community groups, and architecture students.

The goal, according to Community Activator with the Federation of Calgary Communities, Adam Schwartz, was to use small-scale community involvement, with low-cost and low barrier-to-entry projects to take over car-centric spaces and turn them into public art, performance, and gathering spaces.

“I think it’s a little bit of engagement by doing. It’s three days, it’s cheap and cheerful materials, and you’re not investing millions of dollars in public space transformations. But it is a way for people to design space and engage with the public,” he said.

“We fully expect some things might not work out and some things might work better than others. Especially for students, it’s a really cool way for them to get their foot in the door with some real-life experience, putting physical and tangible installations for people to interact with, which we’re pretty excited about.”

Among those top asked-for activation ideas were shade structures, seating, lighting, and places to hang out, Schwartz said.

The choice of Kensington came about due to the BIA already having done a lot of work to activate the community.

“If you haven’t been down to Kensington this summer, it’s already done a whole lot to improve the public realm. So we’re kind of coining this as a celebration of public space, and all the work that the city and that this BIA has already done to make some really awesome public space,” said Schwartz.

Annie McInnis, Executive Director for the Kensington BIA, said that partnering on Park(ing) Day just made sense.

“We’re known as a place that will do interesting and cool and fun stuff and quirky stuff,” she said.

She said that in addition to Park(ing) Day, the BIA partnered with the Calgary International Film Festival on their outdoor film block party (to be held on Sept. 21 from 2:30 p.m. to late) to activate the entire community.

“We’ve worked really hard since the pandemic to focus on how do we bring people safely back to pre-pandemic events and activities. I feel like we’ve had a huge amount of success in that, whether it’s our February drag shows or our summer music activation our Christmas in Kensington,” McInnis said.

Park(ing) Day locations will be largely located along Kensington Road and in Kensington Crescent, with a few spots on the northeast side of 10 Avenue NW.

Park(ing) Day returns with new organizers

The return of Park(ing) Day follows a two-year hiatus during the pandemic.

The City of Calgary ran Park(ing) Day from 2017 through 2021, and Schwartz said this year was the right time for it to return—albeit as a partnership between the FCA, the City of Calgary, and the Kensington BIA.

Among those activations already planned were ones that turn would turn the road into an eclectic urban living room, Schwartz said.

“People are just bringing out comfy, cozy seating into the space. We’ve also got some large frog sculptures—sometimes it’s just adding things into the public realm, peculiar things that people can look at and interact with,” he said.

“We’ve got a cool kind of palette parklet that has an artist that did a mural on the back, and we’ve got one group making their parklet entirely out of recycled materials. Then we’ve also got a group making a parklet in public space out of a lot of reused car materials, which is pretty great as well.”

Among the groups participating this year was Strong Towns Calgary, which planned to build a bungalow-style structure on their Park(ing) Day spot.

Hazen “Bis” Ellwood, Secretary and Media Director with Strong Towns Calgary (STC), said that they decided to use the themes gathered during STC meetings to propose designs for Park(ing) Day to their community.

“The top ones are embracing Calgary’s heritage as a gathering space, embracing this principle called chaotic but smart, which is lots of little incremental actions from lots of people tending to be more effective than big lockdown moves with too much planning. Then just overall, trying to reinforce the theme of reclaiming space from car infrastructure, and use it for pieces that are more suitable for humans,” Ellwood said.

As a result, and through consultations, Ellwood said that they arrived on the idea of a bungalow with a living room and a front porch area.

“I think the beautiful part of this is that it’s going to really activate the street. I believe it’ll make it a lot more interesting for folks who are coming in and accessing the streets for people who aren’t actually involved or know anything about Park(ing) Day and maybe are just walking past,” Ellwood said.

“Taking back the parking spaces, people will say, ‘why don’t we do stuff like this all the time in other places?’ What would it look like for us to reclaim some of the space that we’ve assumed is necessary for the motion or storage of these private automobiles, and really dig into the ways that we have prioritized that in our city, and in our city’s development, for a very long time.”

Although, for McInnis, one of the goals of Park(ing) Day for the BIA, is to remind Calgarians that there are spaces to park in when they decide to visit Kensington—although walking and transit are also encouraged.

“We also want to sort of showcase, along with the Park(ing) Day things, that there’s still places to park. There’s still lots of ways to easily come to Kensington and enjoy this. It’s a public perception that there’s no parking in Kensington,” she said.

“I’ve tracked parking occupancy over a 20-year period, and we’re only ever really at 80 per cent capacity. People will walk a mile across a Costco parking lot, but they just want to park in front of the store they want to go to in Kensington. I want them to park a block-and-a-half away, and see what new shops there are, and what old shops there are, and enjoy Kensington.”

For more details on Park(ing) Day, see activateyyc.calgarycommunities.com/parking-day-2024.