To make Central Park in New York City they rated entire neighbourhoods and forcibly moved people, today in Vienna you don’t need to push anybody out of the way or destroy anything to get a park. Vienna, like most cities, has a lot of room for new playgrounds, patios, performance, and whatever else you can use open space for. To make use of this space the city has opened up the ability to make a parkette to anyone, so if you want a new park in your area just go ahead and do it (ok, after you fill out some forms). These new small-scale parks even get a weird name: Grätzloasen.

This is a great initiative and I hope that other cities take the same approach.

“While we were building it, I remember there were a few people looking at it very weirdly. A few days later, we had neighbours say: ‘Why would you take away a parking space?’” Jana says.

But they seem to have come around. This spring the grätzloase saw more construction as they installed a retractable sunroof. “We had a weekend of building together. Everybody that walked by said: ‘Oh! This is so nice.’”
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Building parklets could be one way of warming people up to the idea. Sabrina Halkic, the managing director of Local Agenda 21, describes them as an example of “tactical urbanism” – low-cost, often citizen-led improvements to the built environment. She sees the grätzloasen as a gateway to further changes.

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