‘Why would you take away a parking place?': the city where anyone can build an urban oasis

The Guardian

6 hours ago

In a quiet corner of Vienna's well-to-do 18th district, Jana is explaining how her assembly of wooden decking and planters is bringing a bit of greenery to the area. 'There's not a single tree on this whole street – it's just parking spaces on both sides.'
This is a grätzloase (neighbourhood-oasis), a miniature park tucked into the side of the road. With the blessing of the city hall, more than 100 of them have sprung up across Vienna. The scheme has been growing since 2015, and its proponents say it's struck a rare balance for urban projects: cheap, community-driven and appreciated by local people.
In theory, anyone in Vienna can build one. A city-funded organisation, Local Agenda 21, provides grants of up to €5,000 to cover construction costs and helps with the admin.
Jana first heard about the scheme at a party in 2019 from someone who had recently put a parklet together. 'A few weeks later I just went by and looked at it and thought: 'This is so cool,'' she recalls. But it took until the winter of 2020 for Jana and her flatmates to consider building one themselves.
'It's kind of complicated; you need to fill in a lot of paperwork,' she says. This involved three different departments of city government, and her group needed to cost everything up before they started.
But she had a couple of things on her side. First, she lived with a carpenter, who could handle the nitty-gritty of actually building it. Second, the organisation told her there was another parklet being taken down on the other side of town that they could pick up and reassemble. The final hurdle was getting the street on board, with some residents pushing back against the idea.
'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.''
The parklet is a huge source of pride for Jana, but it comes with certain challenges. In winter she has to deal with clearing snow from the decking, and during the summer the plants need watering every day.
The grätzloase also includes a box where neighbours can exchange their unwanted things. 'Sometimes people just leave trash there, and it's up to me to figure out how to get rid of it,' Jana says. And as the person responsible for putting together the parklet, she's also responsible for taking it down – should she ever move, she'll need to find a new custodian or be forced to deconstruct it.
Vienna consistently scores highly on environmental and livability rankings – even if its quality-of-life crown was nicked by Copenhagen in June. But these accolades obscure the fact that some districts are distinctly lacking in greenery, particularly in the centre-west of the city.
'Vienna has more journeys by car than 26 cities in Europe, including London, Paris and Berlin,' says Rafael Prieto-Curiel, a researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in the city's third district. He has collated mobility data from hundreds of places around the world.
Despite its excellent public transport network, a quarter of journeys in Vienna are still taken by private vehicles – a figure that ought to be a lot lower, he argues. Removing parking spaces could be one way of encouraging this.
'Asphalt gets super hot – so if you have less asphalt, the city is more livable,' Prieto-Curiel adds. Research shows Vienna saw nearly 50 days of extreme heat last year, a number that's been on the rise. He would like the city to go further and commit to tearing out paving en masse, as Paris has done recently.
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.
'Once people see that something can be done to make the situation better, they develop this bigger vision,' she says.
In 2021, her organisation built a grätzloase in collaboration with a school: 'We had [a parklet on] these four parking spaces. After those were a success, they said: 'Why don't we change the whole street?'' Last year they convinced the city to pedestrianise the entire road.
Jana and Sabrina agree one of the scheme's biggest pluses is it creates new places to hang out. In a city sometimes characterised – perhaps unfairly – as grumpy and unwelcoming, more communal space means a chance to chat to people you wouldn't speak to otherwise.
One Friday evening a group of friends is braving the drizzle to drink cocktails and catch up at the grätzloase. Even later on, at a time when some neighbours may start complaining about noise, it's nothing but smiles and 'good evenings' from people passing by.
Jana compares her parklet with the fate of a restaurant one block over. It closed down a decade ago, with its chestnut tree-lined garden paved over to make way for new apartments. The grätzloase – a place where friends can meet for the sake of meeting – is showing that things can be different.