Whose rights to the city? Parklets, parking, and university engagement in urban placemaking

ABSTRACT

Streetscapes are among the urban geographies shaped by people’s belonging in place and movements through the spaces-between. Such geographies give expression to powerful ideas about rights to the city. Witness international PARK(ing) Day, during which people playfully reclaim on-street parking areas by displacing vehicles and creating parklets. Yet, parklets have been criticised when their installation results in long-term loss of parking spaces. The purpose of this paper is to analyse such contestation in a case that involved a university undergoing significant transformations. As part of its place-making strategy, the university sought to create a parklet on a municipal streetside in a central business district near new purpose-built student accommodation. In short order, the idea was protested by particular stakeholders in the city, and the university later withdrew the municipal development application. As drawn out in our analysis of news reports and comments, the significance of the case is that the parklet was a casualty of deep divisions about who has rights to the city and about the functions of universities. Such divisions also exist in cities around the world and arguably undermine small actions to support decarbonising futures and caring infrastructures that attend urgently needed larger social and environmental gains.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• central business districts
• news media
• ownership
• rights to the city
• temporary urbanism
• university developments

Introduction

Claims about who has rights to the city tend to centre on ideas about ownership and belonging and they continually affect urban geographies. In this paper, we add insights to the literature on such matters (Di Masso 2012; Freitas 2019; Nahar Lata 2021; Purcell 2014; Sorensen and Sagaris 2010; Thorpe 2020). Our first point of departure is work by Lefebvre (1991; 1996) on capitalism, commodification, citizens, and cities. Purcell (2002, 100) has noted that what was at stake in Lefebvre’s ideas was a contingent ‘urban politics of the inhabitant …  [that] may have desirable or undesirable outcomes for the social and spatial structure of the city.’ Purcell thought that the implications of the right to the city were exciting ‘because [the idea] …  offers a radical alternative [to] …  capitalism and liberal-democratic citizenship’ and were also disconcerting ‘because we cannot know what kind of a city these new urban politics will produce.’ Our second point of departure is work by Thorpe (2020) about an in-depth study on PARK(ing) Day examining ideas about rights to the city as they manifest in citizen struggles for greater access to streetscapes.

The research we report here shares with Lefebvre and Thorpe an interest in ideas about legal and psychological ownership and sense of belonging. Our additional focus is on two narratives commonplace in urban development debates that also inform discourses on the right to the city. One narrative concerns ‘not in my backyard’ or NIMBY responses to development proposals. The other concerns ‘yes in my backyard’ or YIMBY responses. Specifically, we examine one inner city parklet proposal developed by the University of Tasmania in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania in Australia. The parklet was to comprise seating and plantings and be adjacent to a new suite of buildings used for student accommodation and education functions. It would have meant leasing 16 on-street car parks from the City of Hobart for five years. Following a period of consultation and iterative planning, but challenged by the onset of the Covid pandemic, the plan became public in late 2021. At that point, it was rapidly opposed by traders and others who thought the university had overreached its mission – despite the organisation’s clearly enunciated place-based strategy (University of Tasmania 2019–2024). In particular, opponents enrolled the news media in their campaign to stop the proposal and the NIMBY response was pronounced.

Our study started out to examine how a parklet could be inserted into the streetscape. Following the protests, the proposal’s withdrawal forced us to modify the study, which enabled us to test two other ideas embedded in larger debates about rights to the city. The first idea is that PARK(ing) Day and other forms of temporary urbanism provide a way to ‘rethink links between power, voice, and agency in shaping the city’ (Thorpe 2020, 22). The second idea is that people generally welcome university engagement in city life, including in relation to improvements in infrastructure (Koekkoek, Van Ham, and Kleinhans 2021).

Thus, our case explores how certain actors aligned – not to create a parklet and unsettle the dynamics of urban capital but to protest the possibility that one would be constructed and could then harm business interests and encourage overreach into the city by the university. In what follows, we expand on our conceptual and practical points of departure, explain the research design and context, analyse several comprehensive media reports on the parklet proposal, and consider hundreds of comments generated by those articles. Referred to hereafter as the Melville Street parklet or just parklet, the case raises questions first about the functions of parklets and the ongoing primacy of private vehicle use and expectations that on-street parking is a right, and second about how universities seeking to engage in urban placemaking might get caught up in such tensions. Those points are considered in more detail in the discussion and conclusion. Our hope is that such questions and insights have wider significance for geographers and others that show how both temporary urbanism and changes in the provision of higher education infrastructures have notable impacts on urban geographies – as do reactions against them.

Conceptual and practical points of departure

Hobart City Council considers selling carpark spaces …  (Sato and Augustine 2021)

Rights claims are deep-seated. Lefebvre (1991; 1996) has argued that social needs have anthropological roots – and we would say those are always spatial. He has contended that such needs include desire for security, certainty, work, predictability, similarity, isolation, exchange, independence, and immediate prospects – and they also implicate insecurity, uncertainty, and so on. He has also asserted that the right to the city encapsulates wholesale claims to transformative and renewed right to urban and civic life, in which places of encounters, use values, and the space of time are supreme resources.

Rights to the city and people’s strong senses of ownership and belonging are at the heart of notions of ‘personhood property’ (Thorpe 2020, 163), and Park(ING) Day exemplifies all that. The progenitor of the parklet movement, it is relevant here. Created in 2006 by Rebar design group in San Francisco, Park(ING) Day is now an international annual event on the third Thursday in September. Foregrounding ideas of ownership and belonging, its premise is that paying a metre ‘amounts to taking out a lease over the space, and while most ‘lessors’ use this to store a car, the space could also be put to other uses’ (Thorpe 2020, 2). On Park(ING) Day, parking spaces on city streets are transformed with astroturf, seating, plantings, and ludic spaces. Many such transformations involve small community libraries, guerrilla gardens, yarn bomb and art installation sites, and pop-up markets (Lydon and Garcia 2015). Each ‘parklet’ is temporary: it has ‘open-ended time frames, its core purpose [is] …  experimentation, and its specific engagement with public interests’ is paramount and …  many such parklets are made semi-permanent to ‘fill gaps in urban development cycles’ (Stevens, Awepuga, and Dovey 2021, 263). In contrast, when created by governments and private sector organisations, parklets may advance the interests of capital (Bragaglia and Rossignolo 2021) because they increase foot traffic in retail precincts (Torrens 2023) or engage in place branding and placemaking (Marshall and Rahmat 2019; Pullen and Montilla 2022).

These conceptual and practical dynamics prompt other questions: Does tactical urbanism matter and when its temporary qualities are lost are other benefits compromised (Lydon and Garcia 2015)? How and with what effects are protests about tactical and temporary urbanism projects influenced by news media narratives, which tend to be oriented to negative stories and to produce durable power relations privileging capital (Arango-Kure, Garz, and Rott 2014; Hajer 2006; Trussler and Soroka 2014)? What challenges do universities face when increasing their presence and engagements in city centres (Addie 2017; 2020; Davison 2009; Ferman et al. 2021; McNeill et al. 2022; Saniga and Freestone 2017)? How does one reconcile competing public and private claims to use streetscapes, including for parking as both a planning requirement and a right (Kimpton et al. 2021; Pojani and Sipe 2021; Taylor 2014)? And, at the core of such controversy, who claims rights to the city and can relational tensions attending those claims be navigated (Althorpe and Horak 2023; Grigolo 2019; Iveson 2013)? Mindful of such questions we do not replicate answers to them that are already in the literature. Rather, we build on those insights.

For us, in conceptual terms parklets convey the idea that citizens have rights to the city and should be able to influence how urban places develop and are used and maintained (Lefebvre 1991; 1996). Yet, city streets prioritise automobiles. Plans to decrease on-street parking are resisted and traders’ views on streetscape projects are often negative. In practical terms, ideas about rights to the city assume that the production of space will be contested by different actors. Consequential local land-use conflicts often rest on whose voices are heard and whose interests are considered and on how different perspectives are valued (Eranti 2017). Sometimes such conflicts are typified as NIMBY and YIMBY responses. NIMBYism captures how individuals and community groups oppose and protest developments in their locales, often because of apparently self-interested or parochial views (Chung 2020; Dear 1992; Esaiasson 2014). DeVerteuil (2013) has suggested that NIMBYism can effectively close off city spaces and restrict certain inhabitants from accessing, occupying, and participating in them. YIMBYism describes how people become politically active in support of development and to combat NIMBYism (Teresa 2022). According to Purcell (2002), ideas about the right to the city are about rights to participate and logically those claims can be framed in terms of either NIMBY or YIMBY responses. Therefore, it is important that citizens and organisations representing citizens are involved in discussions about decisions that affect the production of urban spaces and affect how people access, occupy, and use those spaces.

For us, too, universities are implicated in such matters. Increasingly, universities are having to respond to crises of neoliberal capitalism by adapting to budget cuts and less government funding while being part of cities’ broader neoliberal efforts to stimulate new economic sectors (Ferman et al. 2021). Universities are also heavily invested in public and private partnerships and community engagement connected both to their core mission and to state or provincial economic and social priorities (Carl and Menter 2021; Klein 2021; Koekkoek, Van Ham, and Kleinhans 2021). Internationally, therefore, as well as providing crucial education and research infrastructure they have significant and growing socio-spatial influence on urban planning and development and on placemaking (Addie 2017; 2020; Faroldi and Vettori 2020; Fernández-Esquinas and Pinto 2014). The advent of purpose-built student accommodation in central business districts is one expression of that influence (Chatterton 2010; Fincher and Shaw 2009; Holton and Mouat 2021; Hubbard 2008; Kinton et al. 2018; Mohammed and Ukai 2022). So, too, are universities’ engagements in ground-plane activation of both their properties and adjacent streetscapes (Fincher and Shaw 2007; Molloy 2021). Parklets are one expression of those engagements.

Research context and design

Opposition growing to proposed UTAS parklet as petition exceeds 500 signatures. Traders have denied being consulted …  (Augustine 2021c)

Research context

The University of Tasmania is based in Hobart, Launceston, and Burnie in Tasmania, and in Sydney in New South Wales. It is undergoing significant developmental changes over several years and, in Hobart, that involves moving many operations from suburban Sandy Bay to the central business district (University of Tasmania 2022). The move is embedded in the university’s strategy, which privileges place, local and global consideration of significant contemporary challenges, sustainability, and accessibility in addition to core functions in research, learning and teaching, and engagement (University of Tasmania 2019). To support students from overseas, the mainland, and remoter parts of Tasmania to engage in higher education, between 2014/15 and 2020/21, the university constructed two purpose-built student accommodation blocks in the heart of the CBD on Elizabeth and Melville streets, right near two parklet-style dining decks that had been installed by the City of Hobart (2021). Given the university’s strategic commitment to placemaking, it is not surprising that those inside the university thought a third parklet on Melville Street could contribute to civic life in the area. Certainly, parklets provide ways to make place, constitute connections, and unsettle consumerism and the unsustainable use of private vehicles (Stevens et al. 2022; Stevens et al. 2023).

Of necessity, planning for the Melville Street parklet took account of the regulatory context. In Hobart, roads and footpaths are managed via instruments such as the Australian Road Rules (National Transport Commission n.d.); Part 7A of the Tasmanian Vehicle and Traffic Act (1999); the Tasmanian Road Rules (Department of State Growth 2022); and the City of Hobart’s by-laws for public spaces (2018a) and parking (2018b). Made clear in the last of these documents is that public use of certain spaces – parking spaces among them – is allowable on payment of a fee where such is mandated or by prior arrangement and permit, such as might happen on PARK(ing) Day, which Tasmania’s Young Planners have championed and the City of Hobart supported (see McNeill 2019). Those details resonate with Thorpe’s (2020) observations that parking metres give PARK(ing) Day participants the capacity to ‘lease’ a parking place. That capacity gives the appearance of their staying within the spirit of the law to claim rights to parts of the city normally the preserve of vehicles, and it unsettles preconceptions about what and who owns or has claims and belongs where. The idea of the lease is extensible: in Melville Street, the university and the City of Hobart calculated the cost the former would pay the latter for ‘extinguishing’ parking revenue for 16 carpark spaces for up to five years. In 2020 – as the Covid pandemic struck – the university secured the design brief for the parklet. Its stakeholder consultations were comprehensive and progressed over several months with the full knowledge of the City of Hobart. Then, in late 2021 and in the absence of lockdowns – which had been minimal in any case – more people were frequenting street cafés as the austral spring arrived, and some were taking advantage of seating and the café scene at the new council-funded parklet-style dining deck in Elizabeth Street.

So it was that the Melville Street parklet was proposed as part of a larger city campus masterplan and commitments to ground-plane community engagement (University of Tasmania 2021). The relationship between broad strategy and the parklet’s objectives gains expression in Table 1 (REALMstudios 2021). Emphasised were varied forms of connection to people’s identities and needs, to the specificities of the site and its place, and to formal and informal programs by which to engage. Importantly, the firm’s parklet design (Figures 1 and 2) removed no parking spaces outside any private businesses and was intended to exclude no one.

Table 1. Melville Street Temporary Parklet Development Application. Design Statement

PLACE Design a place that respects the Indigenous histories and living cultures of Country. Provide places for people not private vehicles. Provide safe cycling connections for all ages and abilities. Provide a safe and accessible space for all. Support Elizabeth Street as a primary public transport corridor. Provide a safe and generous pedestrian experience. PEOPLE Connect a network of green spaces that support the needs of the community and strengthen the identity of the precinct. Use local materials that are sympathetic to the character and heritage of place. Introduce native trees and plantings that reflect the local landscape and seasons. Create a comfortable space that works with the climatic conditions of the site. Ensure a flexible design that can be adapted over time as part of an emerging precinct. Integrate urban artworks on blank façades by engaging local artists. PROGRAM Support local traders through flexible outdoor dining and trading areas. Design spaces for lingering that encourages group interaction and socialising and individual reflection. Provide a calendar of events and spaces for impromptu performance. Encourage safe night time use through integrated lighting and activities. Facilitate community exchange through interpretive signage, engagement points and digital content. Adapted from REALMstudios (2021).

Figure 1. Melville Street parklet proposal: Ground plan (University of Tasmania. Reproduced with permission).

Figure 2. Melville Street parklet proposal: Projected street view (University of Tasmania. Reproduced with permission).

Had it proceeded, the parklet could have been democratising insofar as it would have upheld two of Lefebvre’s ideas: observance of the politics of ‘shared inhabitance’ and an insistence on the importance of use value over exchange value (Marcuse 2009). The first idea means being able to assert rights to the city by inhabiting and occupying it because the ‘city is as much ours to use as it is anyone else’s, and as much anyone else’s to use as it is ours’ (Iveson 2013, 946). The second means prioritising democratic production, resourcing, and use of city spaces over capitalist exchange values and powerful economic interests (Althorpe and Horak 2023; Grigolo 2019). Yet, headlines in Hobart’s News Corp newspaper, The Mercury, on 23 November 2021 were inauspicious for anyone supporting the idea that parklets can be innovations led by large organisations wishing to contribute to urban experiments for public good outcomes such as those summarised in Table 1. Within weeks, a media and street-corner campaign protesting against loss of parking spaces and the parklet and alleging the university had overreached its functions resulted in the development application being withdrawn from consideration by the City of Hobart’s planning committee. Thus, it is a matter of conjecture about whether, how, and to what extent generously framed claims about rights to the city were served.

Research design

What is not conjecture is that the news media shapes public opinion (Patterson 1997; 1998) and its sway is partly constituted by perpetual churn in institutional and individual values, in high levels of ambiguity, and in social conflicts (McCombs and Valenzuela 2020) that can be rapidly reported and distributed in ways that maintain the fourth estate’s power (Gregg et al. 2022; Mautner 2008; Richardson 2007). Traditional media such as newspapers appear consistently influential, despite the proliferation of choices afforded to readers by internet-based information and communication technologies (Djerf-Pierre and Shehata 2017). Place is not immune to ongoing media interest; indeed, in local media it is a central motif (Goggin, Martin, and Dwyer 2018; Peters 1997; Westlund 2015). As Salzman (2020, 66, 67) has noted, placemaking events are newsworthy and while long-term ‘policy change is rarely the core of media coverage …  positive coverage can encourage that change’ and yet traditional ‘news coverage is more likely to highlight opposition to placemaking projects’. More specifically, placemaking events that involve that most civic space of the street are – like media reports of them – profoundly communicative acts with a strong capacity to mobilise proponents and opponents and those likely to profit from any conflicts between them, the media included (VanHoose et al. 2022). As placemaking experiments, parklets are also not immune to media influence and their construction is physical and discursive.

Such understandings informed our analysis of seven articles spanning 17 November 2021 to 1 January 2022 (Augustine 2021a; 2021b; 2021c; 2021d; 2021e; Sato and Augustine 2021; Sato 2022). All focus on the parklet and appeared in The Mercury, a News Corp paper based in Hobart that has statewide circulation (see The Mercury 2023). The articles appeared in quick succession in response to the news that the university had submitted its development application for the parklet to the City of Hobart, and they focused substantively or exclusively on that proposal. The articles were ideal primary data because they documented views held by those who could be affected by the parklet’s construction.

Collectively, the seven articles document (a) the rise of a campaign by adjacent business operators to block the parklet that involved them securing 500 + online petition signatures, running a small street rally, and mounting a media response; (b) the university’s subsequent decision to pause and withdraw the development application for the parklet; and (c) a feature reporting views by a ‘complete streets’ advocate, whose studies show both that people surveyed in Hobart wanted parklets and that on-street parking can actually diminish opportunities for business because people linger less. One article published New Year’s Day 2022 noted that business operators who actually favoured the parklet were apprehensive to publicly support it (Sato 2022). [An opinion piece on the international evidence for parklets in cities was published two days before Christmas (Stratford and Jarman 2021) as was one other item by Confederation of Greater Hobart Business chairwoman, which argued that the City of Hobart and university were colluding to damage businesses. Neither is considered because they do not fit our key selection criterion for inclusion, namely that the articles analysed were written by reporters from The Mercury and had no discernible ties to the university or local businesses.]

Other ideal primary data were 651 remarks connected to the reports that appeared on one part of The Mercury’s website dedicated to the parklet. Those comments were valuable because they recorded other views by which readers gathered information and gauged opinions (see Reimer et al. 2021). Seventy-eight comments (12%) opposed the proposal, 33 (5%) supported it, 104 (16%) opposed the university’s city relocation, and 13 (2%) supported that relocation. Seventy-eight (12%) asserted that the university and City of Hobart were untrustworthy – an unsurprising tactic by some of those running for elections to be held in October 2022. Sixty-one comments (10%) were made by traders who opposed the plan in articles. Thirty-two comments (5%) described the CBD as being for business – note the emphasis – and 58 (9%) argued traders need on-street parking, while 32 (5%) referred to a lack of consultation by the university in relation to the parklet; university documentation of its outreach shared with staff in online forums suggest, otherwise. Thirteen comments (2%) argued the parklet would benefit businesses but 19 (3%) asserted that the parklet would force both consumers and traders to relocate. Sixty-five comments (10%) made references to parking or traffic congestion and concerns about Hobart’s limited public and active transport infrastructures accounted for 26 (4%) comments. (Note that there is no intention on our part here to assert that these results accurately represent wider community views.)

Narrative analysis was used to examine the articles and remarks because narratives ‘reveal cultural and social patterns through the lens of individual experience,’ as well as the power of rhetoric and the dynamics of organisational life (Patton 2002, 115). Each article was read and re-read and then coded, first manually in preliminary fashion and then using NVivo. Codes were then reduced in number by being removed if they only appeared once or in one article or by being amalgamated. Analysis of those suggested five broad themes that we elected to consider in detail: constraint, loss, and cost; matters of trust; not just the street but the whole CBD; generational tensions; and parking by right. Of those, parking was by far the most pronounced concern.

Rights to the city and senses of ownership and belonging in Melville street

‘You get rid of a car, you get rid of a customer’: Parklet plan causes parking panic …  (Augustine 2021a)

Constraint, loss, and cost

In Melville Street, NIMBYism was evident in traders’ opposition to the parklet proposal on the grounds that it would result in varied losses. One wrote, ‘I think [the parklet] a terrible idea, it’s going to stop people from coming to our store …  It will affect all businesses along this street’ (Augustine 2021b). Such criticisms also consolidated efforts that led to a campaign and petition to ‘Save Melville Street from UTAS’. One of the parklet’s most vocal critics said that ‘many businesses were submitting individual representations [to the Hobart City Council] but he anticipated many would sign his … ’ (Augustine 2021b). Another trader referred to the Council’s Elizabeth Street parklet-style dining deck as having ‘cost the local businesses here six on-street car parks’ (Augustine 2021b). With municipal elections pending, that idea was quickly politicised by at least one contender, who wrote that ‘this is just the beginning of the UTAS/HCC collusion’s grand plan to kill traders [sic] and make getting around in Hobart even harder and more expensive’. That person then alluded to the university’s move into the city, comparing the parklet as ‘nothing compared to what the HCC and UTAS seem to have shaken firm hands on’ in that respect (Elliott 2021). Conversely, someone commenting on the article online wrote, ‘What a shame the ‘not in my backyard’ brigade is so vocal …  These sort of knee jerk reactions usually come from those with vested interests or those that have no vision or imagination’ (Sato and Augustine 2021).

Sustained over the course of the summer of 2021/22, such narratives point to a sense of ownership of the street by those with adjacent or proximate business concerns. The language is telling and in keeping with others’ findings elsewhere: whether reasonable or not, the reasoning is about constraint, loss, and cost (Kimpton et al. 2021; Thorpe 2020). Coming as it did on the heels of reduced consumer activity during the pandemic the response is perhaps not surprising. The counter-narrative also points to other ways of ‘owning’ streetscapes as a commons by right (Young 2014).

Matters of trust

Trust is central to the idea of having rights to the city (Urban Synergies Group 2016). Conversely, Smith and Marquez (2000) have suggested that distrust is a common characteristic associated with NIMBY debates and can characterise both supporters and opponents of proposed developments. In turn, Zhao et al. (2022) have argued that resolving NIMBY conflicts requires public trust and they have noted that early and ongoing opportunities for public participation in development discussions can increase the likelihood of projects’ success. Clearly, that is not always the case.

We found that people who became members of ‘Save Melville Street from UTAS’ contested statements by the university and City of Hobart that traders were consulted about the parklet and questioned the two organisations’ trustworthiness and reliability. One trader recalled being consulted but still felt misinformed about the parklet’s scope: ‘I’ve had a university rep come in here and he said, ‘we’re putting a park at the end; it’ll be up the road,’ and that was it …  When we read a bit further in the proposal, [we thought] “We’ll eventually be left with four or five spots across four streets”’ (Augustine 2021b). Another trader said, ‘We’ve been to 70 shops and no one was consulted – not one!’ (Augustine 2021c; emphasis added). Our formal interviews with university personnel conflict with that view (Jarman and Stratford 2023b), and with recollections by another trader: ‘It’s simply untrue …  I’ve been at a UTAS stakeholder forum some months ago to which all local traders were invited, but only a handful attended but none of the so-called ‘anti-UTAS’ protesters were there’ (Sato 2022). Even so, the exclamatory trader quoted above later ‘doubled down on his claim that traders hadn’t been properly consulted …  UTAS had mainly reached out to the pro-parklet traders while leaving everyone else out in the cold …  “I think UTAS and the council want to see us against each other, they’re on a divide and conquer mission, but I want all the retailers to win because that’s what it’s about”’ (Sato 2022).

Such narratives reflect the heat occasioned by the proposal, which divided older businesses oriented to the sale of goods from newer ones oriented to hospitality. For the former, carparks outside businesses were equated with customers’ ease of access gained expression in terms that evoke a sense of ownership of the street and prior rights claims. For the latter, parklets outside businesses afforded another kind of ease of access – to leisured enjoyment of the streetscape and sense of belonging in place.

Either way, narratives were full of metaphors about battles against large and allegedly untrustworthy organisations that sought to deny some people longstanding ‘rights’ to the city. Missing from most of those narratives were other conceptions of rights related to belonging beyond consumer activities (see Sandercock 1997). The narratives also align with research on project siting, project risk, and distrust of project sponsors that has prompted NIMBY responses elsewhere. In one paper analysing such responses, Timothy Gibson has pointed out how risk figures strongly, especially where proposals involve contentious human services. Ultimately, ‘the conventional perspective on the NIMBY syndrome rests upon a foundational opposition between the rational/civic interest, embodied by public authorities, and the irrational/self-interest, embodied by local opponents …  local land-use disputes thus take on the characteristics of a morality play: will the forces of ‘good’ win? (Gibson 2005, 385). What is noteworthy about the parklet, however, is that the news media and those opposing the development proposal had inverted that equation and then extended their claims out from the street to the whole CBD. That tactic is addressed next.

Not just the street but the whole CBD

Some Hobart traders opposed the parklet by alleging it would have negative impacts on the rest of the CBD. This spillover tactic is common in NIMBYism so that opposition appears public-spirited and less oriented to site-specific debates where they may be seen as self-interested (Esaiasson 2014). One trader argued that the parklet would ‘have a flow on effect for every shop in the CBD’ (Augustine 2021b). Another, ‘one of the most vocal critics of the Melville Street parklets, said he believed that he was firmly in the majority on this issue’ (Sato 2022), thus making claims about the appropriateness of his position in defence of all citizens’ rights – but to what remains ambiguous.

Some opponents suggested that the City of Hobart was ‘trying very hard to stop people going to the city …  Wouldn’t be [surprised] if there is a plan between Utas and the Council to get rid of cars from the city’ (Augustine 2021c). And another trader wrote, ‘What the uni and these people are saying is that we’re anti-greening-the-city or anti-seating and we’re not. We love all that, but not at the expense of on-street parking’ (Sato 2022). Such narratives have been identified as a form of NIMBYism in which individuals concede the value of a development – just not in their locale, to which they feel high levels of real and affective ownership and belonging (Esaiasson 2014). Where those views become problematic, we suggest, is where they pertain to areas that are public, (most streetscapes among them) and where the environmental consequences of parking (which involves vehicles embedded in a carbon economy) are not fully thought through.

Some business operators favoured the parklet but felt unwilling to publicly voice support (Jarman and Stratford 2023a). Such reluctance may be explained by Noelle-Neumann’s (1974) theory of public opinion and a spiral of silence, which suggests people remain silent on public matters about which they hold strong views because, reasonably, they want to avoid ostracism (see also Lin and Salwen 1997). Reporters from The Mercury did speak ‘to several shopkeepers who were in favour of the move, but who declined to comment citing fears of social media backlash from the ‘anti-crowd’ …  One of them said the precinct was ‘being trashed’ by all the negative media coverage, but she too refused to go on the record’ (Sato 2022). Here are clear indications of deep contestation about rights to the city, ownership, and belonging and about sense of efficacy and safety to claim them.

Similar patterns were in evidence in personal and social media exchanges. Of such exchanges, Hampton et al. (2014) have found people are unwilling to express public views on controversial issues if they think those views are not widely shared. Such insights reinforce understandings of the news and social media as powerful arbiters, including in relation to NIMBY responses (Wang et al. 2019; Wang, Zheng, and Zuo 2021; Zhang, Zhu, and Xu 2022).

Generational tensions

In the case of the Melville Street parklet, there are clear, deep divisions between traders for and against the proposal. One wrote, ‘As a small-business owner in midtown [near the intersection of Elizabeth and Melville Streets] I’m positive about …  the [university’s] teaching staff who will be working in our precinct because they are a whole new cohort of potential customers’ (Sato 2022). Another midtown bar manager who supported the parklet was reported as saying: ‘It’s a wonderful idea. You get so much more space out there, especially with all the Covid restrictions …  We can spread out a little bit and get people to enjoy the sun more’ (Sato 2022).

Both narratives were provided by millennial generation operators. Research by Holleran (2021) has suggested that generational conflict is often characterised by differences in views on how cities should look and feel. Such differences are evident in comments about the parklet underlining a ‘generation gap around the city [between] …  retailers who are not food providers and those who are’ (Augustine 2021c). We do not have demographic data about those providers and cannot conclude if that is a reasonable assertion. It does, however, reflect debates about rights to the city and Holleran’s (2021) consideration of the differences between millennial YIMBYs and boomer NIMBYS, particularly as those relate to environmentally conscious lifestyles as mirrored in declining car ownership, preferences for walkable cities, and inclusive urban spaces serviced by smart public transit systems. Many business operators who actively participated in developing the council’s Elizabeth Street parklet-style dining deck fit into this millennial YIMBY group, and include active commuters and cyclists, an eco-store owner, a handmade goods store owner, and others operating cafés and bars (City of Hobart 2019).

Parking by right

As a general observation, sometimes individuals whose views appear opposed to developments are focused on practicalities but that gets lost in the churn of conflict (Gibson 2005). This point is evident in the case of the Melville Street parklet in one online comment from a reader: ‘As someone who uses the sewing machine shop [owned by a trader at the epicentre of the opposition], parking is an increasing problem. When carrying heavy machines to be serviced, or when purchasing a machine, people need to be able to park close to the shop’ (Augustine 2021c).

Parking was of paramount concern for traders opposing the parklet and was explicitly linked to the university and compromises to customary/customer rights: ‘Parking will be taken by uni students and where are our customers going to park?’ (Augustine 2021b). In opposing the parklet plan, some traders referred to those in Elizabeth Street, one saying that ‘they’re great for the night time eateries but all day they sit empty [sic] and they’re usually only used by smokers. They’re usually strewn with cigarette butts and they smell like an ashtray’ (Augustine 2021b).

In fact, the university had suggested the parklet would ‘make the area more user-friendly and encourage people to spend more time in the city,’ referring to a commissioned survey of city users that ‘found people wanted to see more greenery, activation and street furniture in the city streets around the campus’ (University of Tasmania 2021). Yet, those opposing the parklet continued to suggest there was an ‘agenda to get rid of cars out of the city, but cars are people’ (Augustine 2021b). This idea was maintained even though it is ‘difficult to imagine a land use more blankly unexciting than a car parking spot’ (Taylor 2014, 328). Context does matter, however. In Hobart, people tend to rely on private automobiles in a city with limited and suboptimal public transport services (Stratford and Byrne 2023). Elsewhere, Pojani and Sipe (2021) have noted that people living in areas with inadequate public transport services, the elderly, and people with physical impairments are often car-dependent and that eliminating parking disadvantages them. But disability advocates and scholars have suggested that accessible street designs could enhance city experiences and counter ablism in urban planning (Stafford et al. 2022).

As it happens, Hobart’s midtown area had undergone several design changes since the 2010s and cafés, bars, boutique stores, and barber shops have added to cultural and generational shifts (Hope 2016; McCauley 2019; Vallis 2019). Yet some traders remain fixed on on-street parking. So, as in other Australian cities about which Taylor (2020, 3) has written, it ‘may be that parking conflicts are only a proxy for other concerns about change.’ It may also be that traders opposed to the parklet are, as street designer Steve Burgess has suggested (Sato and Augustine 2021), a vocal minority who do not represent what other traders and members of the community wish to see in this changing downtown area and whose views on rights to the city are narrowly circumscribed.

We think it is contentious to assert that reallocating parking spaces to parklets must negatively affect adjacent businesses. In Toronto in Canada, the removal of 136 on-street parking spaces for a bike lane led to an increase in monthly averages of customers and dollars spent (Arancibia et al. 2019). In one literature review, Bertolini (2020) has found that parklets support increased physical activity, safety, and social interactions and have neutral or positive impacts on local businesses. In another review, Volker and Handy (2021) have found that removing parking spaces to expand bicycle and/or pedestrian facilities generally had a positive or non-significant economic impact on retail and food service businesses close by. Similar findings have been reported in other studies where food service establishments, bars, and retail businesses benefit most from the removal of on-street parking for bike lanes and pedestrian facilities (Arancibia et al. 2019; Clifton et al. 2012; 2013; Poirier 2018).

Those who opposed or supported the Melville Street parklet matched one of two prevailing narratives about supply and demand of parking in Australia (Pojani and Sipe 2021). Opponents tended to fit the idea that parking is a right to be provided and protected at all costs. Proponents tended to fit the idea that vehicles and parking need to be actively limited to enhance liveability. Again, as Burgess has noted of a national liveability survey about what people want in their streets and centres, Hobart is one where people want ‘cars the least …  nice long walkable streets, not dominated by cars are going to make [traders] money and that’s what they were going to get’ (Sato and Augustine 2021).

Elsewhere, studies have shown a tendency among traders to overestimate the number of customers who travel to their businesses via private automobiles (Poirier 2018). Arancibia et al. (2019) have suggested that this tendency explains traders’ opposition to traffic and parking lane removal. Volker and Handy (2021) have amassed evidence that where parking or travel lanes are reduced or removed for bicycle and pedestrian facilities, traders’ fears about disastrous consequences are unfounded.

In the end, individuals who likely would have benefitted from the Melville Street parklet had little visibility in the news media and traders who supported the parklet remained apprehensive about expressing their views in public. Foster and Warren (2022) have argued that NIMBYism can often mean that cohorts who experience the costs of a proposed development will have a say in decision-making while those who experience the benefits are excluded from decision-making. And, over the summer of 2021/22, the University of Tasmania ‘put its development application for a parklet on Melville Street on hold, after the plan received backlash from business owners’ (Augustine 2021d).

It is well-established that controversial and negative articles attract interest and sales of print newspapers and online subscriptions. That insight is not at issue here. Rather, what intrigues us is the extent to which there was such power assigned to assertions that businesses have greater rights to streets than others and therefore have greater claims to the city: As one online comment stated: the parklet ‘needs to be completely withdrawn and the business owners of Hobart need to be promised that they [UTAS] will never try and steal our street again … ’ (Augustine 2021d, emphasis added). In this narrative the rights of other city users have been erased along with any near-term prospect that the Melville Street parklet can realise its potential as an experiment in road space reallocation in the CBD.

Discussion and conclusion

The narratives that constituted news media reports and associated remarks about the Melville Street parklet proposal centred on constraint, loss, and cost; matters of trust; not just the street but the whole CBD; generational tensions; and parking by right. Few opponents appear to have been aware of the university’s design brief and intentions, and consultations appear to have been suboptimal in their view, even as they were praised by others.

Other such narratives constituting more positive responses to the proposal were oriented to claims about getting cars off the street, enjoying the spaces freed up, and enjoying each other’s company in hospitable surrounds. But those responses were either not advanced much, or not picked up by the media. Either way, the outcomes were inflammatory because they touched on deeper and more sensitive issues about who has rights to the city and about how senses of ownership and belonging manifest as well as debates about the functions of universities in urban settings that are, in fact, international in scope. Thus, in the end and despite painstaking preparation, in early 2022 the university withdrew the plan from consideration by the City of Hobart’s planning authority.

Consciously or not, by reinscribing the idea that businesses have greater rights to the city than other city users, local news narratives shaped Melville Street’s political and cultural geographies. Privileging that idea discouraged other traders from expressing their opinions and the spiral of silence reinforced perceptions that those who were against the parklet were representative of a majority. The vocal traders who opposed the parklet and the few traders who were willing to publicly support it both exhibited tendencies which are reflective of NIMBY/YIMBY conflicts elsewhere. In particular, differing perspectives about the parklet point to two prevailing narratives about parking as a birthright and as something to be actively reduced as to improve liveability.

University developments are subject to such dynamics because, increasingly, universities are significant agents of change in cities and actively seek to participate in work to shape how streets function in social and cultural life. Yet, while citizen-led tactical and temporary urbanism can be effective in enacting changes to improve liveability, including in relation to road space reallocation projects that repurpose city streets to accommodate uses beyond motorised vehicles, large organisations may be subject to great criticism when attempting similar projects. It was, perhaps, prescient of Lefebvre (1996, 154) to assert that only ‘groups, social classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can take over and realize to fruition solutions to urban problems.’

By way of conclusion, we return to our opening argument that urban geographies are shaped by claims about who has rights to the city that illuminate other ideas about ownership and belonging. In this paper, we have examined those claims as they relate to a public controversy about a modest parklet proposal that has larger implications, and we have sought to test both how it provides a way to rethink power, voice, and agency and whether people welcome university engagement in city life. We have drawn on Lefebvre’s ideas about rights to the city; allied ideas about ownership and belonging indebted to Thorpe’s work on PARK(ing) Day; and associated literatures. We have suggested that parklets are often seen as welcome and progressive outcomes from do-it-yourself urban activities. That perception exists because parklets have a capacity to unsettle the outcomes of urban development that diminish rights. It also exists because parklets enable people to express senses of ownership and belonging on the streets – sites that exemplify civic participation. But our case also shows how opposition to do-it-yourself urbanist activities is possible on the same broad grounds: that particular senses of ownership and belonging can be ‘threatened’ and that people mobilise in response to that risk, whether it is real or merely apparent, which is no less potent. The case – a parklet comprising 16 car-parking spaces for up to five years – is additionally noteworthy because the chief proponent was a large and complex publicly funded organisation, the University of Tasmania; the chief opponents were small business owners in the CBD of the capital city of Hobart; and the news media provided highly partial coverage of the event such as the university ultimately decided to withdraw the development application.

What was gained and lost in the process? In our estimation, gained was a reprieve for traders concerned about cars being equivalent to patrons. In addition, the parklet debate consolidated a campaign against the university’s transformation plans that also centres strongly on competing claims about rights to the city, rights to an organisation’s future, and forms of ownership and belonging. But also gained was a set of important insights for those working at the university and in the City of Hobart about the parklet and about processes involved in the development application and its withdrawal. Not least among those insights has been a sense that unreserved reception of progressive urbanist ideas and activities has some way to go in Hobart. Lost, therefore, or at least delayed, were all of the possibilities captured in the development application that related to people, place, and formal and informal programs of engagement. Lost, or at least disrupted, has been trust between traders, between council and university, and across other cohorts in the community. Lost, or at least, deferred, have been opportunities to engage with urbanist experiments and provide new ways to think about rights to the city, ownership, and belonging. It will be fascinating to see how matters pan out in the next five years as the university continues its move to the city, a site of continual change and transformation.

Disclosure statement

Elaine Stratford is a full professor in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania. For a part of each week, she is also seconded to Campus Futures in the Academic Division to undertake transformation research that directly relates to the work reported here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Jarman

Nicholas Jarman is a researcher in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania.

Elaine Stratford

Elaine Stratford is a professor of human geography and planning in the same School.