Playful, portable, pliable interventions into street spaces: deploying a ‘playful parklet’ across Melbourne’s suburbs

ABSTRACT

A parklet is a small, relocatable public space installed onto kerb-side car-parking spaces. This article examines the evolving design, programming, approval process and reception of a ‘playful parklet’, available for free public use, which was transformed and relocated between four urban contexts in Melbourne. It demonstrated a creative, collaborative placemaking approach involving artists, game-makers, researchers, residents and local governments. Through analysis of its playful, portable and pliable design, the article highlights three areas of innovation: testing new post-COVID governance and engagement possibilities; incorporating adaptability and incremental adjustment into parklet design; and serving as a platform for new modes of social and spatial play.

KEYWORDS:

• Parklets
• temporary urbanism
• placemaking
• play
• design research

Introduction

In late 2021, as strict COVID-19 pandemic lockdown conditions in Australian cities began to abate, a team of urban design and game design researchers in Melbourne collaborated to create an experimental, playful parklet available for free public use. Parklets are small, relocatable, publicly accessible spaces typically installed onto kerb-side car-parking spaces. They first emerged in 2005 as a form of temporary and tactical urbanism (hereafter ‘T/T urbanism’), informally reclaiming car parking spaces for public use. They have since become increasingly prominent as spaces for outdoor dining, leisure, and social gathering – particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, with its social distancing restrictions – as a way to extend outdoor seating. The playful parklet engages with both these iterations of parklet development – their tactical roots and their evolution into government-endorsed commercial outdoor dining spaces – by transforming the physical shell of a hospitality parklet (designed for cafés, restaurants and bars) into a public space for play and social interaction. It is made playful through programmed activities, workshops and interactive performances, and is available for leisure and play outside these programmed sessions. It is modular and pliable, with new design features and programmes continually being added in collaboration with local artists, game designers and community members. And it is portable, being dismantled and travelling across Melbourne to occupy various locations for several weeks at a time in partnership with various local government departments.

This article examines the context, design, site selection, implementation, and user experience of this playful parklet. It focuses on four locations where the parklet was deployed over six months in 2021-22: the Central Activities District (CAD) of Melbourne, Australia, and the inner-Melbourne suburbs Malvern, Brunswick and Footscray. Drawing on exploratory practice-based research methods, the article examines how the project tested new spatial, governance and community engagement possibilities in a post-COVID world. The project demonstrated the potential for parklets as portable and pliable sites for play, while laying the groundwork for further experimentation with community engagement and playful parklet design.

‘Rethinking the street’: from park(ing) day to hospitality parklets

There are currently thousands of parklets in hundreds of cities worldwide. The playful parklet installed in Melbourne drew upon and extended ideas from 18 years of varied, experimental parklet formats and practices. The world’s first parklet was a two-hour guerrilla intervention by design collective Rebar in San Francisco in 2005. They fed a parking meter with coins, then placed live turf and a potted tree in the parking space, creating a ‘pocket park’ (Thorpe 2020). It demonstrated the potential for local communities to reclaim car parking spaces for pedestrian and public use, rather than vehicles. Subsequently, the parklet movement spread globally, through the annual one-day Park(ing) Day event that began in 2006, and other temporary, tactical reappropriations of streets for public enjoyment. During Park(ing) Day, residents and activists worldwide feed parking meters and fill parking spaces with seats, potted plants and trees, turf grass, yoga mats and umbrellas; afterwards they revert back to car parks. Park(ing) Day is explicitly non-commercial, community-led, and often playful (Lydon and Garcia 2015; Thorpe 2020).

Parklets are one among many examples of T/T urbanism. Variously characterized as temporary urbanism (Bishop and Williams 2012), tactical urbanism (Lydon and Garcia 2015), guerrilla urbanism (Hou 2010) and DIY urbanism (Douglas 2018), T/T urbanism can collectively be defined as ‘the exploitation of both the temporal and spatial interstices of the city’ through low-cost design adaptations which ‘encompasses informal practices … that operate outside state control’ (Dovey 2016, 253–254). Such initiatives range from sanctioned repurposing of spaces for temporary parks, swimming pools and outdoor theatres, to more informal or even illegal interventions such as ‘chair bombing’, guerrilla gardens, street closures and unauthorized bicycle lanes (Dovey 2016; Haydn and Temel 2006; Loukaitou-Sideris et al. 2013; Lydon and Garcia 2015). These ‘lighter, quicker and cheaper’ transformations of public space allow communities to by-pass red tape, and enable municipalities to conduct pop-up events to test and refine longer-term spatial strategies (Project for Public Spaces 2018).

While T/T initiatives are, by nature, quickly and easily removable and modifiable, they can also guide longer-term adjustments to urban space (Lydon and Garcia 2015). T/T urbanism approaches are increasingly being assimilated into formal urban planning and design processes as planners and municipalities recognize their appeal to attract investment, increase property values, re-market suburbs and improve liveability (Bragaglia and Rossignolo 2021; Caramaschi 2020). This potentially makes urban design and planning more fluid, adaptable and accessible, but also raises questions about who has access to these processes, who benefits from T/T urbanism initiatives, and whether they favour already affluent neighbourhoods over disadvantaged ones (Douglas 2018). Critics often align T/T urbanism with ‘the failures of market capitalism ... [and] the polarizing effects of neoliberal urbanisation’, and with ‘by-passing … formal planning processes’. They highlight its capacity to ‘create buzz … stimulate markets [and] change the place identity of rundown neighbourhoods’, thereby facilitating gentrification (Dovey 2016, pp. 260–263; Tonkiss 2013).

T/T urbanism’s incorporation into planning processes often takes the form of ‘creative placemaking’. Creative placemaking is a contested but increasingly common approach to placemaking that incorporates artists and other creatives into traditionally top-down urban redevelopment and local-scaled place management and activation projects (Markusen and Gadwa 2010; Zitcer 2020). For Douglas (2018), creative placemaking brings new flexibility, tacticality and community-driven approaches into urban redevelopment and revitalization schemes. Echoing these recent critiques of T/T urbanism, Zitcer (2020) cautions that creative placemaking can also risk contributing to gentrification and the neoliberalisation of urban planning, as artists and creatives become conscripted into placemaking initiatives that may privilege affluent neighbourhoods over others and ignore the lived conditions of the inhabitants of places they seek to remake or revitalize.

Parklets have followed T/T urbanism’s general trajectory from informal to formal. Beginning with San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks programme, many subsequent local-government-led initiatives have embraced parklets from a top-down planning perspective (Caramaschi 2020). These initiatives formalize and facilitate their propagation by both community groups and individual hospitality businesses. For the latter, governments provide licences for businesses to host semi-permanent parklets that expand outdoor seating space, originally with the caveat they had to remain open to public use. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, these parklets have proliferated and become longer-term installations and often fully commercial, filled with chairs and tables. Melbourne currently has almost 600 hospitality parklets, San Francisco 800.

Pre-pandemic literature on U.S. parklets indicates their potential positive effects, including increasing neighbourhood social interaction and feelings of community; enhancing pedestrian safety; encouraging walking and cycling; and increasing foot traffic and spending at local businesses (Ben-Amos et al. 2018; Dai 2012; Panganiban and Ocubillo 2014; Pratt 2010). But it also shows parklets can elicit ambivalent or even hostile responses, including opposition from businesses and residents due to lost car-parking and unloading spaces; perceptions they benefit certain businesses over others; and NIMBYism (Littke 2016; Pratt 2010). Some scholars argue hospitality parklets simply support neoliberal gentrification, while crowding out potential ‘moments of creativity and alternative urban practices’ (Douglas 2018; Littke 2016, 172). European research has been more optimistic about parklets’ long-term potential as community-led initiatives (Furchtlehner and Lička 2019; Herman and Rodgers 2020).

Returning to play: urban play and placemaking post-COVID

Before the pandemic, parklets’ temporary, small-scale reappropriation of parking spaces for alternative uses demonstrated how cities can be remade for people, not cars. During and after the pandemic, parklets proliferated as semi-permanent spaces for outdoor dining. Pandemic responses showed how slow, conservative approvals process and rigid regulations that privilege cars could be quickly overturned when necessary. The pandemic upheaval was akin to a major natural disaster, ‘upend[ing] the normal operations of cities and communities’ while presenting a ‘window of opportunity for community transformation’ (Gregg et al. 2022, 4–5). Post-pandemic, parklets’ widespread, rapid, incremental reshaping of streetscapes has shown how COVID-19ʹs uprooting of everyday life and entrenched urban planning practices might catalyse a rethinking how cities are designed, managed and used.

The pandemic also highlighted the importance of another dimension of urban life: play and social interaction. Lockdowns severely restricted opportunities for outdoor play and social gathering in public spaces – often having the biggest impact on the marginalized and disadvantaged (Davy 2021). Gatherings of more than two people were banned, playgrounds were cordoned off, and singing and dancing in public venues became illegal in some areas (Hjorth and Lammes 2020). While online forms of social interaction and play increased and innovated, the abrupt loss of outdoor, face-to-face interaction and play showed how vital physical playful places and experiences are to everyday life.

Spontaneous, unplanned play – from large-scale public gatherings, protests and festivals to micro-level chance encounters, games and playful reappropriations of spaces – provide the lifeblood of cities (Knabb 2006; Lefebvre 1968; Sennett 1977). Play constitutes and demonstrates citizens’ fundamental ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968). The possibilities and impacts of play are heightened in urban environments, where the various elements and forms of play – chance, competition, mimicry and vertigo – intersect with the city’s rich cultural, geographic, material, social, and technological affordances (Caillois 1961; Lofland 1998; Stevens 2007).

Play is an important part of both T/T urbanism and creative placemaking initiatives. T/T urbanism is often playful – in innocuous ways that simply bring vibrancy to sterile locations; but also in deeply political ways that use play to contest and transgress the rules and conventions of urban space (Thorpe 2020). Similarly, urban play is increasingly figuring into creative placemaking initiatives, with organizations like Playable City commissioning artists to create small-scale temporary projects that make cities more playful and ‘playable’, aiming to improve citizens’ health, wellbeing, social connections and resilience, and boost economic activity for local businesses (Playable City, n.d.; Swanson, n.d.). Empirical research on these benefits is lacking, but emerging evidence shows that urban play events and activations can ‘put cities on the map’, increase spending and positively reconfigure people’s relationship with place (Ramírez-Moreno and Leorke 2020; Stokes, Dols, and Hill 2018).

The pandemic has precipitated widespread deployment of parklets and other temporary interventions to meet changing practical needs for socially-distanced exercise, non-motorized mobility and outdoor dining (Gregg et al. 2022). But this crisis, and those innovative responses, also present opportunities for cities to reimagine urban design through a more playful, creative and socially inclusive lens. This article reports on the exploration of these possibilities through a design research project that uses parklets to encourage a return to play in the streets. Drawing on both T/T urbanism and creative placemaking approaches, this project posits that reconfiguring parklet design can demonstrate alternative ways of rebuilding and reactivating local neighbourhoods through playful social interaction. The project engages with the tensions around T/T urbanism, and parklets’ instrumental transition from community-oriented to business-serving spaces, by adapting a hospitality parklet for playful public interventions using a creative placemaking approach.

Methodology: Melbourne’s ‘playful parklet’ as a creative practice research project

The playful parklet was launched in late 2021, as Melbourne was incrementally reopening following 262 days of strict pandemic containment measures that had made it the world’s most locked-down city. While this parklet borrowed from previous parklet designs and initiatives, it differs from other hospitality and community parklets in three key ways. First, it is playful and playable, drawing on the Situationist International’s strategy of détournement (Knabb 2006) to transform a hospitality parklet, which had become an instrumental, mass-produced element of urban streetscaping, back into a free space that encouraged participatory play.

Second, it is portable, moving to different locations across Melbourne, connecting with local communities and businesses; and testing out approval processes, design refinement, and public engagement with parklets beyond their COVID-era deployment for outdoor dining. Every few weeks it was dismantled, transported, and reassembled at a new site, occupying two kerbside car-parking spaces, and being licenced through event permits from the responsible local councils. Such portability is unique to this project since, despite parklets’ lightweight, quickly-assemblable, modular designs, hospitality parklets are ‘locked’ to their host businesses' frontages and almost never move.

Third, the parklet is pliable, constantly being modified both through iterations and additions to its design, through collaborations with different urban play communities across Melbourne and to suit changing needs and spatial contexts. To incorporate changing design elements, modifications in design, structure and purpose were made to a pre-approved, generic commercial parklet module, of which hundreds were already deployed across central Melbourne, to make it playful. Added elements included a low performance stage, two benches and a planter box for seating and performance areas, tall banners, and distinctive geometric decorations on the parklets’ interior and exterior. These elements could all be reorganized or replaced depending on different needs and contexts.

The parklet was a testing ground for exploring how residents and passers-by might be encouraged to be more playful and feel more open and confident about returning to public life after the trauma of extensive lockdowns. Various activations were developed, collaborating with diverse local artists and musicians to both create new interactive installations and performances and host already-developed activations within it. Table 1 outlines the diverse activations programmed inside and around the parklet across four different locations during 2021–22. Many activations directly explored the theme of returning to public life. The parklet was also hosted by Playful Spaces Officers (PSOs) – a playful take on the Protective Services Officers who patrol Melbourne’s streets to prevent crime. These staff encouraged passers-by to enter the parklet, asking ‘have you been playful today?’ and explaining and supporting the parklet’s role as a freely-accessible public space dedicated to play and social interaction.

Table 1. The parklet’s playful activations.

Activation		CAD	Malvern	Brunswick	Footscray
	Communitas Passers-by conduct three musicians (singer, singer-bassist and drummer) using hand gestures and word cards in an interactive performance	*	*	*	*
	YomeciBand (YomeciPlay) Chalk creatures are drawn on the pavement next to the parklet; a hidden composer generates playful synth sounds as passers-by step on them	*	*	*	*
	The Plants (Playable Streets) Plants installed inside the parklet use sensors to generate music as people touch and pass their hands over them	*
	Flip the City (Public Assembly) A series of provocative workshops that use props and found objects to prompt conversation and reflection on how we perceive urban space	*
	Play the Commons (Melbourne in Motion) A pop-up space for practising and teaching parkour, using temporary equipment and guidance from movement coaches		*	*	*
	Café Games Playful Space Officers and a local community games group host how-to-play sessions of popular board games inside the parklet		*
	Urban Play School An experimental play design workshop that enlists students to reconfigure the parklet and design games for it			*
	Seaweed Library (Seaweed Appreciation Society International) A pop-up collection of seaweed-related books and artefacts that raise environmental and artistic awareness of seaweed and marine ecologies			*
	Robotics Ensemble (Dylan Martorell) An interactive assembly of semi-autonomous robots powered by a solar generator that generate music and sound			*
	City of Landmore (Dale Nason) An outdoor A2 letterpress prints anagrams of Moreland, the city council’s now former name that had roots in slavery			*
	Open/Lab (Public Street/Alliance for Praxis) A portable structure resembling a door encourages generative discussion around access and ways to plan for more convivial and diverse cities			*
	ConnectUs (Jade Armstrong) A giant Connect 4 board uses tokens with conversation prompts added to them to facilitate meaningful interactions between strangers				*

The playful parklet’s programming and equipment drew inspiration from the many creative ideas developed worldwide over the past 15 years of Park(ing) Day. Previous parklets have hosted outdoor games of Twister, Connect 4, skittles, hopscotch and checkers, and been reimagined as ping pong and futsal tables, videogame arcades, art galleries, gardens, trampolines, and make-believe boats and cars (Thorpe 2020). This project similarly explored how parklets as public spaces could be made more playful through a combination of design elements, programmed activations and spontaneous public appropriations.

The playful parklet draws on both parklets’ temporary and tactical origins in Park(ing) Day (reclaiming car-parking spaces by renting them); and the standardized design of post-COVID hospitality parklets, modifying the latter to make it playful and playable. The playful parklet also builds on other playful T/T urbanism interventions by transforming under-utilized car-parking spaces into places for urban play and social gathering as a means to critique, challenge and provoke the planning and design of public spaces, by temporarily posing alternatives that are nourished by local, grassroots input. Through its programmed activations, and by travelling to different sites across Melbourne, the playful parklet connects with Melbourne’s existing urban play communities and activities, while also carving out new ones.

The playful parklet also draws on methods of creative placemaking. It incorporates artists, game designers, musicians and other creatives as collaborators and co-creators of the parklet space, inviting them to create installations and performances that respond to its physical and locational affordances. The playful parklet’s design team operated in partnership with local councils, who help arrange the approval of events permits, organize traffic management for the parklet’s installation, and help maintain the parklet while on site. The researchers retained full creative control over the parklet’s format, programming and schedule. This collaboration between researchers, artists and local government agencies embodies creative placemaking’s model as ‘a coalition of stakeholders working in a partnership to develop projects that have a public impact’ (Zitcer 2020, 279). In this sense, the playful parklet unites T/T urbanism and creative placemaking.

This paper’s analysis of the parklet’s impacts examines how three of its features – its playfulness, portability and pliability – informed and shaped its interventions into four locations across Melbourne: the CAD, Malvern, Brunswick and Footscray. The analysis draws primarily on the research team’s experience collaborating with twelve teams of artists and four sets of local government officers to create, place and activate the playful parklet. These insights were informed, supplemented and illustrated by a limited amount of data from three other sources:

• Semi-structured interviews: interviews were conducted with ten artists who ran activations in the parklet in its first location, Melbourne CAD; and with the Economic Growth and Activation Officer at the City of Stonnington, which partnered in the parklet’s second implementation in Malvern. These interviews were recorded and transcribed. Interview questions covered the interviewees’ general thoughts about parklets as spaces for social interaction and play, their observations about people’s uses of the playful parklet, the challenges they faced in getting people to use the playful parklet, the unexpected behaviours and uses of the playful parklet they observed, and their thoughts about the potential for playful parklets to reclaim street space for pedestrian use.

• Online survey: An online survey with 24 multiple-choice and open-ended questions was made available to parklet users through a QR code mounted on the parklet itself. The questions asked participants about their general thoughts on parklets, their reason for entering the playful parklet, what they did there, who accompanied them, what impact it had on their day, how they would rate it, and a memorable moment they had in it. The survey attracted only 23 responses across the first two locations, Melbourne CAD and Malvern. As such, the sample is small, unstructured and likely biased towards respondents who either strongly disliked or liked the parklet, rather than reflecting broad public reaction. This feedback provides some indications of the range of reactions generated by the playful parklet.

• Field observation: the parklet was regularly visited during its programmed activations, and irregularly during the full six months of its installation. Most of the parklet's programmed activations were documented on video. Several site visits generated detailed fieldnotes on the parklet’s use, including observations and mapping of behaviour patterns in the parklet and the surrounding public space, as well as brief, informal intercept interviews with both parklet users and creators. The video footage enabled clarification and extension of the field observations.

The parklet’s rapid relocation across four municipalities was a pilot creative practice study focused on facilitating development and refinement of its design and programming. As such, the data gathering from artists and users was an ad hoc trial, not in any way a comprehensive, controlled evaluation. This dataset is small, limited, and neither generalizable nor conclusive. With these caveats, the data is drawn on to provide illustration of the playful parklet’s impacts and its potential capacity to encourage community members to play on the streets post-COVID, and to rethink how street space can be used for social and playful purposes.

Four iterations of the playful parklet across Melbourne’s suburbs

Melbourne’s central activities district

The parklet’s first location was in Melbourne’s CAD, on Little Lonsdale Street, a narrow, one-way lane connecting some of central Melbourne’s busiest streets. The parklet was installed adjacent to State Library Victoria, one of the world’s most visited public libraries, albeit on a side with no library entrance; and opposite a side entrance to QV shopping centre (Figure 1). Wedged between these two whole-block buildings, this street section has only one sidewalk-fronting business, a restaurant that was temporarily closed, and is primarily a short-cut through-route for both vehicles and pedestrians. In November 2021, Melbourne had just re-opened after a three-month full lockdown. Strict isolation measures were still in place and only fully-vaccinated citizens were permitted in indoor venues. Social and economic life was resuming and people were eager to return to the streets, providing an ideal context for testing the parklet.

Figure 1. Parklet on Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne’s CAD.

The parklet’s programming consisted of a series of two-hour activations, each designed to carefully encourage social engagement within social distancing constraints. In Communitas, players used hand gestures to conduct musician performers. The Plants and YomeciBand required the visitors’ physical movement to activate the music. In Flip the City, hosts facilitated visitors constructing hand-held props to playfully view and interpret the parklet’s surroundings differently. These activations struggled to attract participants, with few passers-by stopping to engage with each of them. Downtown pedestrian traffic was still substantially below pre-pandemic levels, and the parklets’ location, relatively isolated from nearby stores and attractions, meant people were reluctant to disrupt their walking to engage with the parklet. Some even crossed the street to avoid it, particularly during YomeciBand sessions when the pavement was covered with chalk drawings. Most artists interviewed reported low numbers of engagement, but strong enthusiasm from those who did stop to interact.

The most successful activation was The Plants, a passive activation without instructions. Passers-by who were attracted to touch the plants generated music, which extended their engagement and could draw in other passers-by. During non-event time, few people used or entered the parklet here. The parklet’s interior elements offered little to attract passers-by or initiate self-guided play. There was little to look at when sitting in the parklet here; another council-owned hospitality parklet located on the same block also remained unoccupied. Additionally, the multi-storey Library overshadowed the parklet’s north-kerb location.

Malvern

The parklet was subsequently relocated to a side street adjoining Glenferrie Road in Malvern, 8 km south-east of Melbourne CAD, in partnership with Stonnington City Council (Figure 2). Previous research had identified Glenferrie Road as Melbourne’s only major north-south-oriented commercial street that lacked parklets (Stevens, Morley, and Dovey 2022). Stonnington’s Economic Growth and Activation Officer noted that traffic volumes and risks made Glenferrie Road unsuited for parklets, and it has relatively few hospitality businesses. Extensive analysis and consultation with council staff led to a proposal to locate the parklet outside a street-corner games store, to capture attention of locals interested in games and play, and to potentially help in promoting and activating the parklet. Another nearby games store raised concerns this would unfairly benefit its competitor, so a neutral location between both stores was selected (Figure 2). Both businesses contributed board and card games for Café Games sessions that were run by local games enthusiasts. This prompted the addition of a Little Free Library to the parklets’ interior for passers-by to borrow, swap and donate games, toys and books. This small tactical intervention triggered curiosity from passers-by and became a permanent parklet element.

Figure 2. Parklet on Llaneast Street, Malvern.

The relatively quiet Llaneast Street location, situated between a commercial corridor with a tram stop and pedestrian crossing and a residential area, had good exposure to passing pedestrians, including many walking to and from an adjacent off-street council-run carpark. But engaging passers-by remained a key challenge. Communitas attracted some interest, including from school children, an elderly woman, and a man who felt ‘uplifted’ by playing it. Many passers-by ignored Communitas or crossed the road to avoid it; the adjoining homewares store once asked the musicians to relocate to the parklet’s far end because they found the noise disruptive. YomeciBand similarly attracted both engagement and avoidance. A nearby Taekwondo school generated passing children who played with YomeciBand before and after their classes. Some contributed their own chalk drawings – an unexpected, raised level of engagement that was incorporated into later performances. Parkour trainers Melbourne in Motion had heard about the playful parklet through a podcast. They spontaneously proposed holding public parkour workshops in the parklet, and developed infrastructure to temporarily transform it into a mini-parkour course for several hours at a time (Figure 2 and Table 1 – Play the Commons).

A final significant finding from the Malvern parklet installation was that it did not generate any negative feedback due to impacts on businesses, traffic or parking, or generate rubbish, graffiti or vandalism. On the contrary, a council partner observed that the parklet’s challenge to Malvern’s car dominance and its demonstration of alternative, playful uses of car parking spaces was ‘the number one benefit’ for the council. They noted that ‘it helps us to be able to demonstrate that you don’t need car parks and you actually can be very happy without them’, and that the parklet’s temporary intervention was ‘a good temperature check for this precinct’ which indicated community openness to further exploratory activations. The survey responses and observations identified a lack of shading as a significant problem for parklet use in summer, but the risks of rain and wind gusts precluded adding roofing.

Brunswick

The parklet’s third iteration was in a trendy inner-northern suburb, Brunswick. It was installed on Saxon Street, a short, narrow, cul-de-sac street only 70 metres from the intersection of two busy thoroughfares: Dawson Street and the multicultural commercial hub and tram route of Sydney Road, one of the world’s longest retail streets (Figure 3). This parklet site was not directly visible from the nearby shopping street or the local indoor shopping centre several blocks away, which meant it was somewhat isolated, but sat adjacent to a social services centre, public library and swimming pool. The southern continuation of Saxon Street, across Dawson Street, was long ago closed to traffic and repurposed as public space. Siteworks, a low-cost, hireable co-working facility for artists, is located one block from the parklet site. This proximity to artistic and public facilities informed the parklets’ programming. Siteworks broadcast a call for parklet activations, which attracted Open/Lab, Seaweed Library and Robotics Ensemble. The parklet also hosted Urban Play School sessions, allowing students to experiment with the parklet’s design and its connection to the surrounding urban environment. Obtaining a parklet permit in Brunswick was relatively straightforward, because traffic risks were minimal, the parklet adjoined council-owned properties, and the local council was a tolerant early promoter of community-led parklets. They allowed the use of self-built timber boxes as crash barriers instead of requiring hard-to-move concrete blocks.

Figure 3. Parklet on Saxon Street, Brunswick.

In this setting, three different one-week-long transformations of the parklet shell were tested. The first reconfigured the parklet as a playable environment, installing chimes and musical instruments inside it. A blank brick wall adjoining the parklet facilitated spreading a canvas sheet roof to protect electronic music equipment during a rainy weekend. The parklet was then transformed into an exhibition space, with portraits of people’s shoes hung along the brick wall. Finally, two tonnes of sand were poured into the parklet, transforming it into an artificial beach, complete with buckets and spades, deck chairs, palm trees and a colourful beach umbrella (Figure 3).

In contrast to previous iterations, this deployment within an artistic milieu meant the parklet’s reception was overwhelmingly positive, with many passers-by, including artists affiliated with Siteworks, stopping to observe, relax and ask questions. The beach transformation was particularly successful. Groups with children passed this quiet lane enroute to the nearby public swimming pool and emerged from it already wearing bathers and carrying towels. Parents and grandparents congregated around the parklet as their children played in the sand. Users wrote on the parklet, its benches and the sidewalk using the provided chalk, communicating their favourable evaluations of the parklet, the exhibition, and other users’ behaviour. The messiness and scattering of the beach sand and many shoeprints indicated that many parklet users stepped out of their normal behaviour to spontaneously play with the parklet. This contrasted strongly with the Melbourne CAD location, where people and the parklet remained clean and orderly. A few Brunswick residents in buildings overlooking the parklet complained about its noise, and just one survey respondent complained about the loss of the limited available parking in Saxon Street.

Footscray

The parklet’s final trial location was Footscray, an ethnically diverse suburb in Melbourne’s inner west (Figure 4). The parklet was situated on Paisley Street, a busy commercial street and major bus transfer hub. This was the parklet’s liveliest location, amidst a diverse array of stores near Footscray’s main railway station and its large, popular indoor produce market. In contrast to the parklet’s three previous locations on side streets, here a constant stream of busses, pedestrians and waiting passengers created rich conditions for play. Even as the parklet was newly delivered and Yomeciband were installing their pavement chalk pathway, passers-by expressed curiosity, and several children enthusiastically began drawing with the chalk without permission. One new game was added to the activation programme, which was well received: ConnectUs, a version of Connect 4 where participants were encouraged to develop social conversations and interaction by prompts written on the game tokens. Communitas, Yomeciband (Figure 4) and Play the Commons each returned for several sessions at this site. In contrast to the previous location in trendy Brunswick, which often attracts outdoor artistic activations, Footscray seldom hosts such interventions, and many passers-by were curious but unsure how to engage with the parklet.

Figure 4. Parklet on Paisley Street, Footscray.

Discussion

The observations and analysis above are now drawn on to outline three key findings about the playful parklets’ impact on the spaces, people and activities that it engaged with. These findings are situated within the wider possibility for parklets, and their playful reactivation of urban streets post-COVID, to prompt a broader and longer-term rethinking of street design and management. The project is shown to have enabled testing of new governance and engagement possibilities post-COVID; enabled exploration of adaptability and incremental adjustment in parklet design; and to have served as a platform for new modes of social and spatial play on city streets.

Testing new governance and engagement possibilities post-COVID

As noted above, while parklets are designed to be temporary and easily installed, altered and relocated, most of them are not mobile. The playful parklet broke with this tradition by being developed from the beginning as a portable, travelling amenity. This portability was particularly useful in the context of Greater Melbourne, a sprawling city of 5 million people that spans 10,000 km². Melbourne’s metropolitan area is divided into 31 Local Government Areas (LGAs) that manage local planning, traffic management and economic development. Each LGA has its own policies and legislation governing parklets. Some LGAs embrace them; others are indifferent or even hostile. Taking the parklet into these different localities was an important litmus test of popular and organizational support for the hypothesis that parklets can serve as a new, post-pandemic approach to local-scale urban planning which privileges people and play over cars and commerce.

The first four LGAs the playful parklet visited were already parklet-friendly. All had adopted streamlined parklet permitting systems during the pandemic to allow hospitality businesses to increase outdoor dining when social distancing requirements severely restricted their capacities for indoor and sidewalk patrons. The City of Moreland (now renamed Merri-bek), which hosted the parklet in Brunswick, had pioneered a pre-pandemic parklet programme in 2017, explicitly recognizing parklets’ potential to contribute to street life, public life and community (Moreland City Council, 2017). Merri-bek and Stonnington LGAs both have processes and resources supporting community parklets as well as hospitality parklets.

However, deploying the playful parklet within these LGAs required operating outside their existing parklet permitting systems, because this parklet was not driven by a kerb-side business or recognized community organization. The workable arrangement in all cases was to classify it as a short-term street event, which required traffic management approval, a temporary road occupation permit, and an event permit, and which restricted the parklet’s duration. The ability to deploy this parklet within these LGAs was also dependent on finding strong advocacy and support within local governments’ professional staff, often including the waiving of permit fees.

The project demonstrated how a travelling, pop-up parklet can be activated for play in a city with a strong arts and cultural scene like Melbourne’s, particularly where there is pre-existing experience, enthusiasm and support for parklets and other forms of T/T urbanism (CoDesign Studio & Street Plans Collaborative 2014). The playful parklet successfully attracted interest from artists, businesses and community groups in each new location, expanding its programming. The research confirms that popular support from actual and potential users of T/T interventions also influences success. While several survey respondents praised the parklet’s concept, describing it as a ‘happy space’ and ‘a great space without cars’, others deemed it ‘unnecessary’ and ‘an unused set of chairs where nobody will see it’. It remains to be seen how successfully the playful parklet can engage municipalities and communities in different contexts. Although all of the four neighbourhoods that the playful parklet was deployed in are ethnically and culturally very diverse, all were relatively affluent inner-city suburbs. The parklet has not yet been deployed in any outer-urban or rural municipalities, which are often overlooked in creative placemaking initiatives, and which may benefit most from the kinds of public space activations that the playful parklet can bring. Future research could address this.

This action research project also indicated that if local governments want to encourage wider publics to use street space more playfully, they need to encourage and support a wider range of actors to develop, apply for and manage a greater diversity of such projects. The broad public hesitation to approach and use the playful parklet highlights the strong perception that Melbourne’s existing parklets are a privatization of street space by hospitality businesses, not broad public amenities. It also reflects the challenge of enabling pro-active public appropriation of street space in the context of existing street regulations.

Adaptability and incremental adjustment in parklet design

From its early planning stages, the playful parklet was intended to be pliable: for its design to be incrementally adjusted and improved to address changing circumstances and opportunities. The use of a standardized hospitality parklet shell sought to demonstrate the potential to extend existing street spaces and furniture types to facilitate play. This parklet unit was already pliable because it was composed of discrete modular timber planter boxes, which allowed it to be easily reconfigured for different-sized sites. Across four iterative deployments of the parklet, elements were added, removed and repositioned so that the parklet offered various new appearances and opportunities. It was transformed from a tidy, open, maximally-functional space in the Melbourne CAD to a library-like space with shelves, chairs and tables in Malvern, and was filled with non-urban play materials (sand and palm trees), bolted-down musical instruments, sun shading and storage furniture in Brunswick. These elements designated the parklet as a space for play, leisure and relaxation, rather than commercial dining. The parklet’s Playful Spaces Officers improvised adapting its fixed benches into storage by loosening some timber slats.

Although the parklet was intended to be as open and pliable as possible, the angled shape of its performance stage was designed to optimize its visibility for the first site in Melbourne CAD (Figure 1), and it could only be positioned in one end of the parklet. This constrained the possible positions of the parklet within the various subsequent neighbourhood streets. Performers needed to maximize their visual exposure to pedestrian flows on the major cross-streets nearby, and this determined which side of the street the parklet would stand on. Thus, in Malvern the parklet had to be positioned on Llaneast Street’s south edge so that its stage was visible from Glenferrie Road to the east (Figure 2).

The playful parklet’s flexibility and portability were significantly limited by the safety requirement to instal concrete blocks on its street-facing corners. This necessitated a large delivery truck, a locally-available forklift, suitably-licenced drivers and a traffic management plan for bumping-in and bumping-out. Local government policies have developed to support stationary parklets for hospitality, not to facilitate portable parklets that can service larger areas and wider populations or be adjusted for varied functions. In quiet Saxon Street, Brunswick, where concrete blocks were not required, two people could manage all installation and transportation activities, handling the playful parklet’s lightweight timber elements using screwdrivers, wheeled dollies, and light utility vehicles. The project confirmed that creativity, portability, pliability and play require local government accepting and enabling ‘light, quick, cheap’ solutions and the attendant risks (Project for Public Spaces 2018).

This parklet installation demonstrated that the resilience of playful urban interventions requires not just flexibility, but also robust design, so they can provide broad and lasting benefits. The added interior elements – the raised stage, benches and triangular planter box/table, the musical chimes – were bolted onto the parklet, so that they could be easily removed or repositioned, but could also safely withstand users’ playful impacts. It was also necessary to securely fix pot plants and deck chairs to the parklet to deter theft. Parklets and other forms of temporary urbanism often incorporate lightweight, cheap, readymade elements and materials, such as milk crates and forklift pallets. This research highlighted that these are too fragile and pose too many risks as platforms for climbing, dancing and many other, unanticipated playful actions. The playful parklet’s elements withstood the rigours of parkour training sessions, with people standing on and jumping to and from them.

The project showed that if municipal governments want to design urban spaces to be open for creative appropriation and play, they should do so around maximalist ideas of functionality, not minimalist ones. Such spaces and their fit-outs should support broad and even unknowable and somewhat risky activities (Stevens 2007). The experience of deploying the parklet across different spatial contexts and local government regulatory regimes also highlighted that the design of such interventions has to work creatively and flexibly with constraints to maximize activation possibilities. Adaptable, playful designs are needed to creatively address many constraints and challenges, including aversion to risks, the visibility and accessibility of playful opportunities, the territoriality of individual businesses over street frontage, and the public’s hesitancy to be engaged and to transgress convention.

A platform for new modes of play

The playful parklet launched at a time of upheaval and uncertainty as Melbourne, which had been one of the world’s most-locked down cities, was transitioning from ‘COVID-zero’ to ‘COVID normal’ policy settings. This provided an ideal context for exploring play’s potential to bring people back onto the streets, and for also rethinking how street spaces dedicated to cars might be partly repurposed for people. The parklet’s key challenge was to encourage people to come out and play in the locations it visited. Yet many local residents remained reluctant to engage with the parklet’s playful programming. This was particularly the case for projects like Communitas, Yomeciband and Play the Commons, which require an element of participatory, physical performance. Children were the most enthusiastic participants in these projects. More passive installations, such as The Plants, were more successful at inviting unprompted interactions from passers-by, particularly adults. The parklet's varied programming revealed some of the challenges and opportunities of getting people to pause their daily activities and engage in urban play, especially when they are not already in a playful frame of mind (Leorke 2018).

As city planners and policymakers increasingly look to play as an antidote to the sterility of functional urban planning, play-makers must find ways to encourage genuine, spontaneous play – rather than simply conscripting people into organized play activities. The reluctance of many parklet visitors to take up the PSOs’ gentle encouragements to ‘be playful’, and visitors’ uncertainty about the parklet’s purpose, show that simply creating a free space for play does not mean passers-by will readily embrace that opportunity. Better mainstream and social media coverage of the parklet was not possible during this short, exploratory test phase. But the long-term success of Park(ing) Day shows this helps generate awareness and ‘buzz’ that both expands audiences and overcomes reluctance to engage (Thorpe 2020).

The very short timeframes of the parklet’s approval and occupation in each location also limited opportunities for community consultation and especially the intention to connect with existing urban play communities. While both Play the Commons and Café Games emerged from the parklet’s local contexts, these were serendipitous outcomes, rather than planned ones. In most cases the parklet’s activations involved artists already known to the project team, rather than emerging organically through local collaboration. The parklet showed that temporary interventions can create platforms for appropriation by artists, game-makers and community members, but that cultivated, longer-term connections with creative makers are also necessary to generate collaborative programmes and activations. There is an inherent tension between spontaneity and planning.

In both Malvern and Footscray, the playful parklet sat directly in front of local businesses. While these businesses tolerated the parklet’s approval, they did not participate in its activities. The two games stores in Malvern contributed board and card games and programming suggestions even through there were located at a distance from the parklet. This demonstrates that a playful parklet does not need to be hosted by an immediately-adjacent business. Indeed, too much business involvement in the parklet’s management and its activation could make the parklet appear privately owned. The playful parklet benefited from being an independent space that facilitated the maximum variety of hosts, users, uses and adaptations. This was augmented by posted signs and provision of Playful Space Officers to actively encourage people to explore playful opportunities. The parklet also benefited from proximity to major activity centres, which maximized and diversified its use and value, and stimulate varied forms of play. Its liminal condition – a space that incrementally extends the edge of the existing sidewalk, situated near a busy commercial street but not on it – served well the need to carefully balance proximity to social activity with freedom from regulation, so as to maximize playful possibilities (Stevens 2007). This confirms other recent research that shows parklets have proliferated at the edges of commercial zones, where people are likely to slow down and be open to chance encounters (Stevens, Morley and Dovey 2022).

Conclusion

The playful parklet is an ongoing action research project that demonstrates and develops the potential to reimagine parklets as sites for urban play and community engagement, and to do so by playfully adapting and activating an existing hospitality parklet rather than designing a new space format from scratch. This parklet design has proven to be portable and pliable, being readily relocated between local government areas on a tight schedule, and accommodating small-scale iterations of its design as well as larger-scale transformations that provided new opportunities for creative experimentation and drew in passers-by. This portability and pliability extended to the parklet’s activations: numerous new playful projects were developed in collaboration with local artists, designers and community members, through both planned and unplanned connections.

The research presented here indicates some of the difficulties of capturing empirical data about the public reception of innovative, short-term urban installations like the playful parklet, which have varied and changing forms and programming, and where it is unclear how and when users might respond. Future research can expand and improve upon the preliminary, exploratory methods used here for capturing and analysing data about users’ reactions to the playful parklet, and data about the experiences of artists, local government actors and others who activate these spaces. Data-gathering methods such as user feedback, intercept surveys, video recording and participant walk-throughs can potentially be creatively integrated into the design and activation of the space, to yield higher response rates, closer engagement with users, and richer data.

In terms of learnings about planning processes for urban space, this project has identified, tested and overcome the significant limitations of existing local government permit systems for parklets. These systems remain focused on long-term stationary parklets for hospitality use, and are not conducive to mobile, experimental parklets for free community use and playful social interactions. It was possible to obtain permission to deploy this playful parklet due to good existing connections with local government staff. Stonnington and Merri-bek LGAs, both affluent inner suburbs, were particularly receptive to exploring the potential of new parklet formats and uses. But even here, survey responses showed resident and business opposition to appropriating ‘their’ regular car-parking spaces.

Obtaining local government permission to create this new space for play was also eased by approving the parklet through a short-term event permit rather than long-term appropriation of on-street parking spaces; partnering with an experienced installer of hospitality parklets; and significant inputs of time and expertise from a set of academic researchers in urban design and games design. Significant barriers remain for less well-resourced and well-connected groups who may wish to host more playful parklets or to pursue other tactical initiatives. The playful parklet has also yet to visit less-advantaged suburbs or rural locations. Nevertheless, the project demonstrated that the spatial, social and administrative conditions exist for playful parklets to be deployed and activated across different urban contexts.

The project also demonstrated the benefit of combining T/T urbanism and creative placemaking approaches, enabling engagement with both local government and creative actors while retaining both ‘lighter, quicker, cheaper’ flexibility in the physical form and creative autonomy in community engagement and activation. Parklets themselves have evolved from a one-off tactical urbanism initiative, through Park(ing) Day, into the formalized and commercialized spaces of hospitality parklets. This project shows that new initiatives can borrow elements from all these evolving models, including by deliberately ‘informalising’ that which has become formulaic. While the parklet is small-scale and temporary, its presence tests out communities’ responses to playful, pop-up neighbourhood spaces, which can potentially galvanize support for more permanent transformations in streets and in the processes of managing them (Lydon and Garcia 2015). The playful parklet established a possibility space for exploring alternative uses of parking spaces, and ways of being and behaving in public spaces, that can prompt a wider rethinking of how cities can be designed and planned. The initial phase of this project only hints at these possibilities. Future iterations of the playful parklet can explore these issues further by taking the parklet to new locations; interlinking multiple parklets to connect and engage people more widely across urban space; making the parklet’s physical infrastructure more open to play and collaboration with local communities; and discovering yet more ways of activating such spaces. This object and these ideas remain pliable, portable, and playful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP180102964].