Tactical urbanism has the power to pierce the automotive bubble that so frequently surrounds politicians — sometimes in an almost literal sense, because so many elected officials are driven everywhere. It can force them to see that they can become catalysts for rapid change if they really want to. But the value of these tactics goes well beyond the safety (and frequent smiles) that these interventions provide for cyclists or pedestrians who pass by while they’re in place — or even the permanent infrastructure changes they might inspire.

A key benefit of tactical urbanism is that it helps, or even forces, the average person to see our car-based reality for the social construct that it is. As the philosopher and noted media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1968, “One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

Just as water is invisible to the fish, hardly any of us can perceive the swirling sea of cars and car-centric infrastructure around us. It’s just the world in which we’re swimming — or driving. The trick, then, is to make the water visible to the fish.

That’s exactly what a small band of artists and urbanists attempted to do in San Francisco back in 2005. On a crisp fall morning, John Bela, Matthew Passmore and Blaine Merker — members of an art and design firm called Rebar — stopped their pickup truck next to an empty sliver of curbside on the sunny side of Mission Street between First and Ecker. Bela hopped out of the truck and fed the meter a fistful of quarters. Then, instead of parking their truck in the space they had just paid for, they began unloading it.

First, they spread a tarp over the black asphalt. Atop the tarp they unrolled a mat of sod. On top of the green grass, they placed a park bench. Opposite the bench they put down a 15-foot-tall potted tree to provide a bit of shade. They surrounded their tiny park on three sides with a fence made of plastic bollards connected by rope, leaving it open on the side facing the sidewalk. In about 15 minutes and with less than $500 worth of materials, the trio had transformed an on-street parking spot into a small public park.

According to Bela, he and his colleagues were interested in “interrogating the idea of ‘the right to the city’” and the “internalized assumptions that are built into how we think about the use of space, the politics of space, and who has access.” How do we collectively decide who gets to use public space, and for what purposes?

Bela, Passmore and Merker had been looking around San Francisco for “unscripted pieces of land” where they could conduct a real-life experiment in urban transformation. They settled upon the metered parking spot as the ideal laboratory.

“You’ve got commercial real estate just next door that’s worth hundreds of dollars per square foot,” Bela said. “But for just a couple of dollars an hour, any person with a car can lease this patch of public space in this heavily contested, high-value terrain.” Why could private automobile users pay so little to use this desirable curbside real estate? It just didn’t make sense.

As far as the three partners understood, there was no rule or regulation mandating that only cars could be left at metered spots. “We decided to explore the boundaries of that short-term lease,” Bela said. “Rather than parking a car, we would be park-making.” The tree, bench and real grass created a clear and legible invitation for people to use the space like any urban park, albeit a very small one, without it appearing like they were participating in some kind of “political protest or artistic intervention,” Bela said.

After setting up their parking space-size park, the collaborators went to the roof of a building across the street to observe how the experiment unfolded, a little nervous that their understanding of the city’s parking code might have been incorrect. “We all had suits in our car in case we got arrested,” Bela said.

They were also concerned that busy pedestrians might not even notice the grass-covered space. If they did, would they understand what it was for?

Within a few minutes, a man walking down Mission Street stopped, sat down on the bench, unwrapped a slice of pizza, and began to eat. Another man sat down on the edge of the potted tree, opened a newspaper, and began to read. Pretty soon, the two were chatting. Then they were laughing.

Before long, Bela and his colleagues — watching from afar and snapping photos — realized they were not going to need to put on coats and ties for an arraignment that day. More and more people stopped by the grassy space to look at it, use it and talk about it. “We created a social space,” said Bela. “We created an invitation for public life, for socializing in a place that was previously just used for storing cars, for storing metal boxes.”

When the time ran out on the parking meter, Bela said, “We just packed it up, rolled it away, swept up, and disappeared.” Just like that, the space transformed back into a nondescript slab of asphalt for storing one private automobile.

Photos of people using the parking space spread across the blogs and websites of the early aughts. To some, the pictures were little more than the internet novelty of the day. But to people who had been making the case against cars and fighting for more livable communities for ages, Rebar’s experiment felt like a revelation.

It not only was a brilliant illustration of how small changes to a street could make a big difference to people’s happiness, but also invited individuals to participate and take action themselves. They didn’t have to protest or wait for people in power to change the status quo. They could be the change they wished to see in their cities, one parking space at a time.

Within a few weeks, Rebar was inundated with requests from people in cities all over who wanted to do their own versions of this parking-size experiment. In response, Rebar produced an illustrated how-to manual, modeled on the simple assembly instructions that come with IKEA furniture, and posted it online as a free download.

“Improve your neighborhood. Improve this street with this type of space,” the instruction manual urged. “You don’t need to hire an architect or a designer or work with the city. Just do it yourself.” They called their concept Park(ing).

Recognizing that taking over on-street parking might be legally risky depending on the city — and that it might expose people to physical harm from angry drivers — Rebar announced that starting in 2006, the third Friday of September would henceforth be known as Park(ing) Day, a day when people in cities around the world would take over metered, on-street parking spots and creatively transform them into tiny public parks.

The event “provided people with this political cover, that other people are doing the same thing around the world on the same day,” Bela said. Park(ing) Day participants wouldn’t just be out there on their own, doing some weird project and preventing motorists from snagging the perfect parking spot. “You’re part of a movement to reclaim streets,” he said.

Mixing simplicity with creativity and holding fast to the tactical urbanism spirit of short-term actions for long-term change, Park(ing) Day draws in people who might never have given much thought to how street space is used, altering their perspective in the process. “It’s not an overt protest,” Bela noted. “It is demonstrating an alternative to automobile dominance.”

The first official Park(ing) Day resulted in 47 mini-parks in 13 cities in three different countries. Eighteen years later, there were at least 178 Park(ing) spots in dozens of cities across five continents, with Bela estimating that anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 people participated in one form or another. These installations now go beyond greenery and park benches; groups have transformed on-street parking spots into mini-playgrounds, yoga studios, chess clubs, farm stands, pollinator gardens, hammocks for napping, café seating, and just about every possible use of public space imaginable.

Wherever it happens, Park(ing) Day is wildly creative, elaborate and joyous. It demonstrates that, if given the opportunity to cut through or circumvent the typical bureaucracy, it is quite easy to create space for people, not cars.

Excerpted from Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek, in agreement with Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, Aaron Naparstek, 2025.

This post was originally published on Next City.