To understand a city’s character, look no further than its parklets (which, as you know by now, are those mini–urban parks that replace parking spots with public amenities). San Francisco will never say no to a potential hack—witness Rebar’s awesome but ill-fated parklet made from a sliced Citroën cycling van—and Los Angeles will turn just about anything into a workout. With the opening last week of two new parklets on Spring Street in downtown LA, passersby who regret downing that entire venti mochaccino can hop on one of the parklets’ two exercise bikes and people-watch while squeezing in a few minutes of cardio. Their bored companions can try a hand at the foosball table or just text from one of the nifty swing-style seats. Sure beats idling in a car! Read more.

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Parklets—those open-to-all pockets of public space that turn street-parking spots into seating—are usually welcome additions to neighborhoods, though they do occasionally have their detractors. But in San Francisco, the parklet that’s stirred the most controversy is one that looks (oh, irony of ironies!) like a parked car.

Back in November, the bike-gear shop Rapha Cycle Club, working with the design studio Rebar, gave the Marina district its first parklet in the form of a sliced Citroën H Van, whose head and tail stretch across two parking spots at the corner of Filbert and Fillmore streets, bookending the seating, tables, and bike parking within. As a public space that repurposes a motor vehicle for the use of pedestrians and cyclists, the Citroën design is the most concise expression of the parklet ethos we’ve seen yet. And that all may change soon, because of a permitting snafu and a city supervisor who doesn’t like… cars? Read more!

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We love parklets, little pockets of urban greenery created out of underutilized parking spots. Matarozzi Pelsinger Design + Build‘s new one in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood ups the design appeal of the basic parklet. Like the extroverted aunt who angles your sofas when you’re not in the room, Matarozzi Pelsinger’s pro-bono parklet on Noriega Street transforms three slanted parking spots into a parallelogram with greater lounging potential. Click through for more pictures!

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A 1902 diagram illustrating Ebenezer Howard’s concept for the Garden City, which sought to do away with the crowding and pollution of early-20th-century industrial life. Photo courtesy of SPUR

As we sit here in the perpetual LCD-screen glow of the 21st century, fantasizing about the floating cities and moon-bounce bridges that will populate the urban amusement park we all are apparently yearning to live in, we have much in common with our urban predecessors, all of whom wanted to remake their inherited spaces and carve out a new logic for living. The ancient Greeks used their colonies to roll out the rationalist grid system. The Renaissance Italians, frustrated by their narrow, crowded medieval streets, sketched ideal Vitruvian cities full of proportion and symmetry and devoid of people. In the U.S., 18th-century agrarian idealists organized Westward Expansion in an ever-unfolding grid of six-mile-square townships. Le Corbusier, grossed out by the dirt and disarray of the modern industrial city, compartmentalized every bit of urban space into its own safe little OCD box.

In the new exhibition “Grand Reductions: 10 Diagrams That Changed Planning,” the nonprofit urban think tank SPUR tracks the history of urban desire in its most distilled form: the diagram. On view at SPUR’s San Francisco storefront through February 15, “Grand Reductions” unravels the ideals and anxieties lurking behind seemingly unassuming maps. The orthogonal is political! Click through for some of our favorite diagrams from the show.

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A parklet on Valencia Street in 2009. Photo: Tristan C/Flickr

In case you missed the memo, today is PARK(ing) Day around the world. Contrary to its name, PARK(ing) Day is a playful protest against car-based city planning: participants, including architects and artists, take over metered spots and transform them into SUV-sized rec areas complete with hammocks, Astroturf, and even pop-up mini-golf courses.

In honor of PARK(ing) Day 2012, we bring you a roundup of some great parklets that have sprouted up in recent years, plus some of the shots rolling in from today’s festivities. Read more!

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Architectural Record recently wrote about a noticeable trend on the streets of San Francisco: nearly two dozen mini-parks, or “parklets,” have appeared in neighborhoods across the city, sprouting up atop parking spaces in front of shops, cafes and galleries. Reclaiming the street for pedestrians, these small-scale interventions come in the forms of driftwood benches, scrap-wood playgrounds, and pleasant combinations of bike racks, planters, chairs and tables.

More after the jump.

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