It is easy to padlock a single gate and close a park. Yet it is far harder to padlock a street that has been turned into a park. For there are numerous alternative design patterns to the separated, managed ‘central park’ model. Given the need to refocus much of what we do around biodiversity restoration, alongside public health and social justice, are those models that look to pervade the condition of the park through the city itself, completely reversing the idea of the separate park? Here, the park becomes the idea of flipping space inside-out such that the street itself becomes the park. This super-distributed model can be thought of as a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ design pattern.

There are precedents for this. For example, Ron Finley planted and cultivated gardens across vacant lots in South Central Los Angeles. Finley has calculated there are 26 square miles of such lots, which adds up to around 20 Central Parks. Those lots have "enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants.” But gardening in South Central LA is about more than the production of tomatoes. As Finley says "gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city."(Though he does add, "Plus, you get strawberries.")

Leonora Ditzler and team at University of Wageningen researched ‘pixel farming’, which also exemplifies this ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ pattern. Her work is a form of intensified, highly-distributed and diversified companion planting in 10cm by 10cm plots, only possible through alternate technology models, different notions of environmental care and fundamentally reversed paradigms.

These landscapes cannot be captured simply by their pattern of spatial distribution, as if on a typical map spread out in an urban planning office, but also by the actual condition of their lived experience in a place; what these spaces do; how they act; and how you are involved and embedded within them.

Parks, as currently understood, cannot produce this complex lived experience. There is a vast difference between 20 Central Parks and 26 square miles of vacant lot. The ability to locate the latter outside your front door, in what we might call the ‘one-minute city’ of your immediate environment, enables the more complex interactions between a more diverse set of conditions, uses, activities, vegetation and people.

There is much academic research into numerous forms of psychological, physical and social wellbeing that would be generated or promoted by transforming our living environments with 'salutogenetic' approaches to health. In other words, producing environments that make us healthier rather than unhealthier. Yet, despite the original idea of the park as a set of life-saving lungs, at this point, we cannot unlock these salutogenetic benefits by making separated parks. Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher write of the need to "do away with conservation's long-standing infatuation with wilderness and associated ideas of 'pristine' nature … the spectacle of nature and instead focus on 'everyday nature' in all its splendour and mundane. Indeed, we argue that it is in the mundaneness rather than the spectacle that we can find the most meaningful engagement with nature." 

This mundaneness describes, to some extent, the humble municipal park – rather than the showpiece Central Park model – as well as the everyday act of gardening or of simply being with the natural environment in more un-programmed ways, truly opening up the sense of possibility in the idea of the park which is often lost when it is governed by someone else.

During 2020, the Australian artist Linda Tegg's installation Infield created a meadow outside the Swedish centre for architecture and design, ArkDes, in its concrete car park outside the museum's front doors. Kieran Long, ArkDes director, described how the installation asked questions of public spaces that could "work with nature instead of against it, making space for non-human species and sharing the city with them." Indeed, Tegg notes that due to these intensive human-plant interactions, "Sweden's remnant infields are among the most species rich plant communities on Earth." There’s a looseness to Infield, with its overtones of re-wilding cities, yet it works precisely at this scale of pixel-farming and is based on hundreds of highly modular small elements. It’s not hard to imagine these meadows emerging in streets, growing out of parking spaces as they become available, as part of a transformation from street to park and garden.Our challenge is to live amongst such species-rich biodiversity, as one of these active species; not by placing nature 'over there', cultivated across agricultural infields or lying fallow in outfields but in public space, in urban space.

Creating gardens and meadows that are curated, cared for and owned by residents is a powerful act given the context of streets and spaces currently regulated and maintained by abstract others. In fact, such shared gardens and meadows necessitate engagement. They require care.

In that 'flattening', we learn not only to live with non-humans but as humans too. Paraphrasing Sennett again, the point of cities is to learn to live well with people who are not like us. Now we know we must learn to live well with non-human life too.

The most complex part of that mission involves the governance and how the street itself can decide, care for and cultivate these newly participative forms of park. Currently, streets are largely optimised for traffic due to how the governance is arranged. In other words, if we give the street to traffic planners, we get traffic. The clue is in the name. If we give the street to gardeners we’d get gardens. What would we get if we gave the street to the street itself and suggested that the answer might be a new form of park but on their terms?