How Good are Parklets?

Lecture overview Parklets are innovative, dynamic public spaces that are temporarily installed onto on-street car-parking spots. These very small spaces have had a very large and lasting impact on city streets. This lecture draws on a seven-year research project that traces the parklet’s evolution and critically examined its purposes, formats, and impacts. The research draws on archival materials, expert interviews, typological analysis, mapping, field observation and creative design practice. It reveals parklets’ potentials to reshape streets, meet diverse social needs and foster community engagement, as well as their challenges, critiques and potential negative impacts. It situates parklets within the wider push towards temporary and tactical approaches to planning, designing and managing cities. This one small, specific spatial intervention provides many new insights into the complex interplays of actors, interests, processes, and materials that are currently transforming urban landscapes - one parking space at a time.

Speaker information

Quentin Stevens is Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University in Australia. From 2004-2009 he was Program Director of the Diploma/MSc Town and Country Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning. He has a professional background in architecture and urban planning and his research focuses on the design, use and management of urban public spaces and on urban morphology. His most recently completed research project examined temporary and tactical urbanism in Australia and internationally. His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, The British Academy, Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and by foundations in South Korea and Taiwan. His findings have been published in a series of books, including Temporary and Tactical Urbanism (2022, with Kim Dovey), Activating Urban Waterfronts (2021), Memorials as Spaces of Engagement (2016, with Karen Franck) and The Ludic City (2007).

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