Show us what you wish your city would do with *all* that parking!
It’s the last week of November again, and that means it’s time for a time-honored Strong Towns tradition: Black Friday Parking!
Since 2013, we’ve urged our readers to get out and take photos of the incredibly wasteful amount of parking in their city or town, to highlight the huge cost to our places of All. That. Asphalt. We started the challenge—which quickly went viral beyond our wildest expectations—with the hashtag #BlackFridayParking for a simple reason: Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is supposed to be the biggest retail shopping day of the year. This one day has long been the excuse of many a retailer to provide way, way, way too many parking spaces—and the pretext for local governments to mandate those parking spaces whether the businesses even want them or not. “Surely we’ll need all that parking on Black Friday!”
Of course, the reality is that many of them still go unused, even on the last day you’d expect them to. Parking is an enormous financial and quality-of-life drag on our cities, and what better day than Black Friday to point that out? At least in a normal November.
Of course, this isn’t a normal November. With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, in-person retail sales are not what they were. Photographing largely empty big-box lots in 2020 might not have the same impact as in years past: Of course that parking is empty this year, many will say.
But in fact, this year proves, more than ever, that we need to free our cities from the straitjacket of parking minimums. The pandemic has strained cities’ finances, and threatened the survival of thousands of local businesses all across the continent. We simply can’t afford to waste so much precious land on car storage when we need to provide for our citizens’ pressing public health and safety needs—and to have the financial wherewithal to do so.
#iwishthisparkingwas ….
So, this year, we’re treating #BlackFridayParking a little differently. We want to know what you’d like to see instead of all that parking in your city. And it doesn’t have to be retail parking this year—public, private, any sort of use is fair game. Show us a place where there’s too much parking, but more importantly, tell us (or even illustrate for us, if you’re artistically inclined!) exactly what we’re missing out on by not taking a more flexible, adaptable approach to that space.
So here’s the deal. Get yourself and your camera ready for the 2020 parking challenge.
Get outside and take pictures of excessive or underused parking in your town.
Upload your photos to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram with the hashtag #blackfridayparking AND the hashtag #iwishthisparkingwas . And then let us know, in an image or in the caption, exactly what you’d do with that parking lot that would create more value for your community. (Housing? Offices? Park? You decide!)
Check out other peoples' photos from across the country, which we’ll be posting in real time on Strong Towns on Friday, November 27th!
Get Creative!
The sky is the limit here. If you’re artistically inclined—a stellar sketch artist or a Photoshop wiz—you don’t have to settle for a text caption: illustrate for us what you’d love to see instead of parking!
Data, maps, aerial photos, Street View: it’s all kosher this year. We’re tossing out the rule book.
It’s helpful if you highlight the parking in some way to make it stand out. This is an important visual technique to help people actually SEE what we all so often take for granted: just how much of our world is used to store cars. Some tips for how to do this:
If you’re on your phone, your basic photo editor will likely include the ability to doodle directly on a photo you’ve taken with a pen or paintbrush tool.
If Instagram is your platform of choice, you can even tweak the image right in the app before posting!
Free software such as Preview (Mac OS) or Paint (Windows) offers basic image editing capabilities. Putting a translucent polygon on top of an area you wish to make stand out is a great way to highlight the space parking takes up.
You can also create a new slide show in Google Slides, upload your beautiful parking photo into your slide from the “Insert” menu, and then select the line tool’s drop-down menu and choose “polyline” to draw a freeform polygon, which you can fill in with a translucent color.
Parking dominates our world so much that it’s hard to really see it. This Friday, join your friends in the Strong Towns movement and let’s show the world just what we’re missing out on by prioritizing space for cars where we should be making more space for life.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.