Dallas on an April Sunday. Photo by author.

Downtown Dallas is dead on a Sunday. And it’s not necessarily due to vacant land.  How can otherwise robust cities use imaginative programming to invigorate underutilized infrastructure and space?  In contemplating the vitality of our urban environment, it might prove instructive to think not only in terms of vacant space, but also in terms of vacant time.

Inhabitants of cities have long employed creative solutions in appropriating vacant space to serve cultural and social purposes.  A typical approach involves the permanent conversion of derelict land to create a common good.  This could take the form of a park—think of the High Line, one of the most high-profile success stories of this type of thinking.  Closer to my front door—30 feet away, in fact—stands another example at a smaller scale.  Thanks to a community initiative, the Urban Meadow (below) arose from the ashes of a corner lot rendered vacant by the burning of a church.  Today, the park regularly plays host to events such as music festivals, plant sales and Easter egg hunts.  The Urban Meadow has become a symbol of pride and enjoyment for our Brooklyn neighborhood.

Red Hook Jazz Festival at the Urban Meadow. President and Van Brunt Streets, Brooklyn. Photo by author.

Aggressive Alternative Inhabitation, or “The Replacements”

Where permanent transformation of space is not possible, individuals and communities have engaged in ephemeral alternative occupations of land—the occupation of temporal voids rather than spatial voids.  In some cases, this stems from a top-down approach.  Consider the countless festivals (Bastille Day, for instance) occurring in New York during the warmer months, for which several blocks of busy streets are temporarily closed to vehicular traffic.  A rabble-rouser might call it “occupation by fiat.”  Perhaps more interesting is the guerilla urbanism embodied by grassroots movements such as Park(ing) Day, in which metered parking spots around the globe are converted into “temporary public spaces.”  Both of these tactics rely on a strategy of programmatic replacement.  That is, streets are given over to the community for alternative use, and parking spots are reclaimed by pedestrians.  For further reading on what The Street Plans Collaborative dubs “tactical urbanism,” see the recent publication, Tactical Urbanism: Short Term Action/Long Term Change.

Left: Bastille Day pétanque tournament on Smith Street, Brooklyn. Photo by author. Right: Original Park(ing) project in San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Rebar/Andrea Scher.

Accommodative Alternative Inhabitation, or “What Happens When the Barge Is Empty?”

Instead of enacting cultural use of open space through various forms of transitory expropriation (street festivals) or appropriation (guerilla tactics), what if the idea of house-sitting were employed?  Put another way, how can we respectfully interject social activity into an existing—and possibly privately-created—functional framework?

My wife and I live across the street from a bustling shipping container terminal in Brooklyn—bustling, that is, on the days surrounding the new arrival of cargo ships, which occurs a couple of times per week.  For four or five days a week, the parking lot serving the terminal boasts round-the-clock queues of trucks coming in and out of the yards—apparently an efficient operation.  On the off-days, though, the lot lies dormant, save for the occasional land grab by a bagpipe player in need of a remote practice room or a parent intent on schooling a budding young driver.  While the parking lot obviously is not a forgotten wasteland, at times it might as well be.

Red Hook Container Terminal. Google Maps Imagery ©2011 Google ©2011 DigitalGlobe, Bluesky, Sanborn USDA Farm Service Agency, GeoEye.

Left: A busy day at the terminal, with a docked barge in the background. Right: An off-day at the terminal. Photos by author.

Satellite view of Williamsburgh Paper Stock Co. Google Maps Imagery ©2011 Google ©2011 DigitalGlobe, Bluesky, Sanborn USDA Farm Service Agency, GeoEye.

Enter Eric Ayotte of WORK Gallery, who recently has given the parking lot an alter ego.  This spring and summer mark the first season of the gallery’s TRUCKS film series, in which an idle truck at the Williamsburgh Paper Stock Company (a cohabitant of the lot) serves as blank canvas for video projection.  Rather than squatting on dormant land, WORK has recognized an opportunity to fill a temporal void when the lot is not in service.  Consequently, a turnaround becomes a stage, a trailer becomes a screen and a driveway becomes a theater.  When the season kicked off two weeks ago, we were even able to enjoy the event—a collection of animated short films projected onto a trailer using a three-channel set-up—from the fire escape of our fourth-floor apartment across the street.  It was a nice change of pace from the truck-and-crane variety show typically staged outside our window.

Much like the Urban Meadow, TRUCKS (not to mention the gallery itself) has contributed to the offbeat vitality of this rugged Brooklyn neighborhood.  Ayotte and WORK have taken advantage of the unique characteristics of this particular waterfront site—cranes, containers and skyline in the background, open air, and a film projection formatted specifically for a truck trailer.  Moreover, the films drew a modest crowd from the passing vehicles on Van Brunt Street, a few of which stopped to take in the spectacle and inadvertently form a rear theater wall.  Free and open to the public, more film nights will undoubtedly follow as summer arrives.  So keep your eyes peeled, and head to Brooklyn when the time is ripe. 

Daytime activity outside Williamsburgh Paper Stock Co. Photo by author.

Alternative Inhabitation at Night. Photo by author.

Photo by author.