People sit in a “lounge” area of a mini park that takes up a metered parking space as they participate in (Park) ing day September 18, 2009, in San Francisco, Calif. Photograph by:Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
EDMONTON – Some protests are a punch in the face, others a tickle under the chin.
The first will make you angry and defensive, the second more likely to get you laughing and thinking.
The Occupy movement exemplifies the first, far more aggressive kind of protest, while the second is represented by a new movement known as Park(ing) Day, which will hit Edmonton on Friday.
The two movements share a desire to shake up things. In the fall of 2011, Occupy protesters grabbed and held a piece of private property on Jasper Avenue for a month, protesting what they saw as the infection of corporate capitalism. Police finally raided them and took down the camp.
Park(ing) Day is a worldwide event where activists and artists try to make their cities a bit more difficult for cars to park, but a bit more interesting to live in. On Friday, about 30 people will take over parking stalls between 97th and 96th streets on 101A Avenue.
One participant is going to set up an outdoor recording studio in his stall. One group plans to sit and knit all day. A croquet tournament is planned for another stall.
Park(ing) Day is occupying the city in an unusual way, but it’s not to be a grandiose, aggressive and indefinite occupation. Participants plan to only be there from noon to 8 p.m. They also plan to plug the meters.
Artist and activist Chelsea Boos is organizing Edmonton’s Park(ing) Day. Boos is fascinated by public art, especially art that isn’t meant to last, such as guerrilla knitting, where people put colourful knitted items on a tree or a statue to change the scene temporarily.
“It’s quick and dirty,” she says of ephemeral art. “You can just get in and out, make something that instantly changes that space, and then it’s done, and you’re gone, and then you can move on to the next one.”
She did not seek out permission from city authorities to hold Friday’s event. “I’m not going to call 311 and ask if it’s OK,” she says. “They won’t know what to say. Because it’s weird and people don’t know what to do when faced with something weird and confusing. It doesn’t fit the bureaucratic lines of procedure … And then it will get stalled and I won’t be able to do it.”
What about the reaction of car drivers on Friday? What if they want to park there?
“I don’t really care. Because everything is about drivers all the time. So maybe for one day we can just not think about drivers. For one day!”
She’s a driver herself, she says. “But when I need to get somewhere in a car, I’m not thinking, ‘I’m the most important thing in this world.’ Cars are not the most important thing in the world.”
She hopes the short occupation is troubling to drivers, but only just a wee bit. “I hope it might cause a reaction from people who aren’t expecting to see whatever we put there, people who might be hoping to park there. I hope they are open to it and are willing to engage with it. If not, I hope it maybe causes them to think again about who these spaces really belong to, and what their uses could be. It’s just about being imaginative. I’m trying to push people gently. I don’t want to cause any fights. I just want to kind of poke at what goes (on) without questioning.”
What most separates Park(ing) Day from Occupy is that Occupy was essentially anti-social, while the opposite is intended by Park(ing) Day, and that’s why I have little patience for Occupy but like the sound of Friday’s event.
As Boos says of Friday’s event: “I just want to play in public spaces. I just want to get people playing out on the street. We spend too much time in our own homes, just not connecting with people. There’s something so beautiful about meeting other humans on the street and being surprised. You know, bumping into someone you would not normally bump into and having a conversation, or not, just sharing an experience together, then going your separate ways. That’s what the city is about.
“I hope it’s the weirdest day that people have ever seen.”