Trading (Public) Spaces

Rebar, a "creative collective based in San Francisco" that (as far as I can tell) uses the environment to address the artistic and architectural concerns of its members (or vice versa), caused a minor stir (and earned some plaudits) last month by rolling out some sod in a metered parking space in the City by the Bay and declaring it a "(park)ing space".

While I'd give Rebar points for being clever -- much more so than, say, Christo, though much less so than Sony -- the Rebaristas get the smackdown here for stepping outside the bounds of their medium by describing the aim of their effort as "[p]roviding temporary public open space in a privatized part of town."

Privatization? That's the so-called problem they're tackling? We still live in an era where a good portion of even downtown San Francisco is privately owned. And that's a good thing. But, while the city offers dozens of public parks of varying sizes -- Golden Gate Park, for example, boasts more than 1000 acres of public space -- it apparently doesn't have one smack in the middle of the city's commercial center. (Note: There are no skyscrapers in Yosemite.) And that, folks, is Rebar's beef.

Still, even if Rebar is right -- that it's somehow a problem that private property owners in San Francisco's business district choose not to build parks for public use and instead choose to utilize their resources to set aside space to conduct business, for example -- they still wouldn't have a case.

First, they've taken over a public parking space (two, actually, if we count the space occupied by what I assume is their rented UHaul pick-up truck). There's nothing at all private about a public parking spot. Nothing. Anyone can park there provided they feed the accompanying parking meter.

What's so special about a park versus a parking space? Beauty can be in the eye of the beholder. While a park can be nice, and a parking space is not seemingly as "free" as a park, there are certainly things one is permitted to do in a parking space that can be illegal to do in most public parks. (One can park their car in a public parking space after dark, for example, or play music loudly provided the noise stays in the car. Often, though, cities prohibit people from entering public parks once the sun sets and ban the playing of music in most public spaces.)

So the folks at Rebar have simply shifted the utility of one public space from that of a parking spot to that of a strip of grass. That's cute, and it's thought-provoking in that it causes in most of us what cognitive science refer to as expectation failure, but it's also a politically meaningless act.

My second beef with Rebar is that its actions bring to mind a Joni Mitchell song. That's never good. And, to borrow from America's most famous park-bench squatter, "That's all I have to say about that."

Finally, Rebar's two-hour (park)ing space is so prohibitively expensive as to render it as little more than a one-off performance-art experiment. How so? As this Rebar post and its accompanying photos make clear, here's just what went into this (park)ing spot, [along with my completely made-from-whole-cloth* estimate** of what each item(s) cost]:

4 rows sod (each approx. 15-20 ft. in length) [$100]

1 bench (suitable for seating two, constructed of wood and wrought iron) [$300]

1 tree (approximately 12-15 ft. tall) [$500]

1 tree planter [$100]

1 UHaul Truck rental [$35]

Coins for parking meter (two hours for two parking spaces: 1 space each for UHaul and for (park)ing space) [$4]

1 sawhorse (of the type used by city work crews to connote “caution” to passersby) [$35]

2 tarpaulin(s) [$15]

3 signs (1 small for parking meter and 2 larger for sawhorse and parking-meter signpost) [$50]

5 signposts (of the type suitable for demarcating space and of the type used, for example, with a velvet rope) [$75]

1 pair gardener’s gloves [$10]

1 gardener’s hat [$20]

1 hardhat [$25]

1 package rope [$5]

1 roll duct tape [$3]

1 roll clear tape [$2]

Total estimated cost: $1,279

Wow! Two hours of greenery isn't cheap! It's even less so when you figure out it would have taken at least 20 minutes to set up the parking space. So the two hours for which Rebar fed the meter quickly turn into more like 100 minutes of greenery.

That breaks down to an estimated cost of $12.79 per minute of greenery, or $767 per hour. Based on current San Francisco commercial real estate rates it would be just as cheap to rent a sod-filled 5x5 commercial space. For a month.

Again, I've got nothing against Rebar's (park)ing space. It's a clever idea. It's cute, even. But by labeling it a counterattack against private property Rebar invites criticism for what's wrong with its idea instead of acclaim for what's right.


*My estimates are undoubtedly incorrect, as estimates (especially mine) tend to be. I invite the folks from Rebar to send me actual dollar figures for each of these items.

**Note that since I have no idea if staff volunteered their time I've not included any salary or other compensation in my figures here.