Reclaiming Our Streets
“Local residents in a densely populated inner city suburb of Sydney campaign to repurpose an ugly carpark into a thriving town square ”
The prioritisation of car parking in our busy town centres and along our cities’ high streets increases traffic, pollution and noise and discourages people from staying in an area to socialise and create a sense of community. To make matters worse, the increasing tendency of local councils to not install seating or shade along high streets (or worse to install hostile architecture) further discourages the use of our streets for anything but the most utilitarian uses.
This is as true for Sydney as any major Australian city. For a country that is known to love being outdoors and with a climate that is conducive to lingering outside, we’ve created an urban environment that discourages people from sitting outside and enjoying the streets. As Committee for Sydney says in its excellent Reclaiming Sydney’s High Streets report:
“Most of Sydney’s streets, including its main shopping streets, lack places to sit. It’s a sign of a great street when it invites people to stop, rest, and check out the urban scenery. This, along with shade and shelter, is a key element in enticing people to stay on a street rather than just walk through. We shouldn’t have to go to a café every time we want to sit down.”
Hostile architecture in Dulwich Hill (left) and Marrickville (right)
At Better Streets we want the community to be able to use and enjoy safe, attractive, shaded, comfortable streets for recreation, socialisation, safe transport, community events, and more! And a critical point of public space is it should be for everyone and not cost money to use. At the same time, studies have shown that people walking or riding a bicycle spend more money in local retailers than people arriving by car and improved walking and cycling amenities can increase retail spend by up to 30%. It’s well established that when you design streets for people, you get all the things that come along with that: community, leisure, connection, recreation, commerce and celebration.
One way to address our car-dominated city high streets is to advocate for car parking spaces or entire carparks to be given over to community use through conversion to ‘town squares’, parks or parklets in place of kerbside parking for public use or cafe use.
Good Design Projects, Parklet commissioned by Randwick Council
But how to do this? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but here are some things to think about:
Talk to local businesses, community organisations, chambers of commerce etc to persuade them of the economic benefits of increased foot-traffic and get them on side. Remember to quote the studies about retail spend mentioned above.
Build community support for the initiative through petitions or letter-writing campaigns to council to demonstrate to local government that the community wants this conversion long term.
Consider who in the community you need to convince to get people over the line and design your social media strategy that way, keeping in mind that different demographics / age groups tend to use different platforms, with younger generations favouring instagram and tik tok over Facebook or Twitter.
Translate messaging into local languages so all communities in your area are made aware of the campaign.
If advocating for conversion of an entire street-level carpark, work with council to conduct pilot / popup events like Saturday markets, concerts, etc in the space, to demonstrate the community need for its use as a public space and get the surrounding businesses on board.
“In some cases, the best way to change the way a street works will be to test interventions through temporary pilot projects. This was famously how New York City began the process of pedestrianising Times Square: the first move was temporary planters and a coat of paint. Cities all over the world have converted single parking spaces at the side of the road called “parklets” - small art installations, mini parks, and café seating that occupy parking spaces next to the kerb. Bike lanes, bus lanes, footpath widenings, and many other changes can be trialled on a temporary basis. Lessons from the trial can then be converted into permanent changes.”
Marrickville Town Square
Sydneysiders love the rich multicultural heritage, offbeat underground arts scene and fabulous food offerings of Marrickville, an inner city suburb around 5 km from the Sydney Central Business District. But if you’ve ever walked down traffic-filled Illawarra Road on a hot day to buy groceries, queued for a banh mi, or played chess at Café Nho, you’ll probably agree – it would be so nice to have a shady place to sit down, for people to come together, socialise, chat, eat their banh mi without having to resort to hovering next to the carpark or sitting in the back of their vans. Currently there are very few central places to gather in Marrickville, in the style of the Piazza in Summer Hill or the new Parramatta Square, and also very little seating or shade along the major high streets…
Locals trying to eat their lunch in the only available bit of public space on Illawarra Rd - the back of their van in the Calvert St carpark. Source: Dan Conway.
Plenty of street parking on Illawarra Road, Marrickville, but nowhere for people to sit down.
For this reason, a group of local residents have started a petition to the Inner West council for the conversion of the Calvert St carpark into a town square.
The group has also:
Developed eye-catching and professional proposal documents to present to councillors in meetings;
Attended council meetings to raise the issue and regularly met with councillors to advocate for the plan;
Handed out flyers to commuters at the carpark where the square will be;
Inputted thoroughly into council’s Marrickville Public Domain Master Plan
Met with local small businesses (sometimes) and local music and arts venues - in one case securing funding to print 15,000 glossy fliers.
Met with local community groups and collectives and other stakeholders in the area.
Met with town planners and professional staff at various levels of government for advice.
Done local radio interviews on the subject.
Built a solid following of supporters via Facebook and a mailing list and kept these supporters up to date with campaign ideas and events.
After two years of work, the council has expressed enthusiasm for the idea, passing a resolution in May to trial a public car-free community event in the carpark in 2024/25.
But the goal of the campaign is a permanent reclaiming of that space from cars, for community use. The space could be used for food markets, outdoor music, chess, table tennis, screenings of football matches, and any number of community events. Therefore the campaign is ramping up support for the petition currently, to demonstrate the extent of the support for such a change in the community.
Artist's Impression of the proposed Marrickville Town Square
The campaign’s experience has been that most local residents are desperate for a public space and the proposition makes total sense to people intuitively. Some choice quotes from petition signatories include:
I want more public space that's filled with people and families, not just cars jostling for parking space.
Any public space where people can meet and socialise is a great idea. Especially when people are living in high density residential areas.
I would love to hang out in a town square and would absolutely not miss the parking even though I drive!
Wouldn't it be amazing to have a community space? We need more of these community, communal spaces, where we interact, hang out, pass by, rest, connect.
Cities need to be structured around people, not cars.
The biggest barriers are those in the small business representatives who are very concerned about loss of parking. The campaign has worked to reassure residents that there will still be back street parking and direct them to parking areas they may not know about, while emphasising the need to improve public transport, widen footpaths, and generally improve public amenity so residents don’t feel compelled to drive to their local shops.
We encourage you to sign the petition for Marrickville Town Square here: https://www.change.org/p/we-want-marrickville-town-square
For more information:
Sign up to the mailing list on the MTS website
Go to the Facebook page
