{"id":520658,"date":"2010-04-08T15:01:40","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T19:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dirt.asla.org\/?p=4313"},"modified":"2010-04-08T15:01:40","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T19:01:40","slug":"san-francisco%e2%80%99s-pavement-to-parks-program-expands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/520658","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco\u2019s Pavement to Parks Program Expands"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nSan Francisco’s innovative “Pavement to Parks<\/a>” program, which reclaims unused stretches of streets and turns them into public plazas and parks, is expanding with the addition of more sites. There are currently four new plazas across the city, with four more in the works. According to the project, streets and public rights-of-way make up 25 percent of the city’s land area, more than all space alloted towards public parks. “Many of our streets are excessively wide and contain large zones of wasted space, especially at intersections.” For San Francisco, unused streets presents an opportunity to generate new public space at relatively low cost.<\/p>\n

San Francisco was inspired by New York City’s efforts to turn streets into pedestrian plazas. In New York City, excess roadway has been\u00a0transformed into plazas and seating areas “simply by painting or treating the asphalt, placing protective barriers along the periphery, and installing moveable tables and chairs,”\u00a0writes Pavement to Parks.\u00a0There’s also the new Times Square pedestrian plaza, which was recently made permanent\u00a0(see earlier post<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It’s not clear whether each Pavement to Parks project\u00a0will seek permanence like NYC’s Times Square.\u00a0San Francisco’s new\u00a0public spaces were initially designed to test the “potential\u00a0of the selected location to be permanently reclaimed as public open space.” Given the low-cost nature of the materials and\u00a0relatively simple designs, the new plazas can be left in\u00a0place of picked up and\u00a0plugged in elsewhere in the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pavement to Parks says the locations are selected based on a set of criteria:<\/p>\n