Matthew Passmore/REBAR P

Title: PARK(ing) Day Project

Location: Over 500 cities worldwide

PARK(ing) Day originated in 2005 as the experimental reprogramming of a niche of public space - a single metered parking space in downtown San Francisco. There, for the duration of the "lease," REBAR created a temporary public park, open to all, in an area underserved by public open space.

In 2006, the project blossomed into a one-day, global event in which volunteers built temporary parks in parking spaces, in a coordinated effort to reprogram the urban fabric on a grand, yet distributed, scale.

For PARK(ing) Day 2007 participants constructed 200 parks in over 50 cities worldwide. The installations ranged from dinner parties to croquet courses, dog parks to public reading rooms, community health clinics to urban micro-farms.

PARK(ing) Day 2008 is Friday, September 19th.

Directed by Matthew Passmore, John Bela and Blaine Merker, REBAR is an interdisciplinary collaborative of artists, designers and activists based in San Francisco. REBAR's work often engages regulatory systems and frameworks as artistic media, particularly as these systems relate to the organization, categorization, use and re-use of land. One way to approach REBAR's work is to compare it to the methods of sampling and remixing used by DJ's. Much like a DJ samples recorded sounds, REBAR's work appropriates elements of the physical and cultural world and remixes them into novel contexts. By "remixing the landscape" in this way, REBAR exposes new meanings and alters assumptions about our shared environment.

REBAR