An initiative taht has transformed several public spaces in Santiago de Chile. This tactical urbanism intervention is one of the many ways by which South American society reclaims the streets and transforms them into social platforms.
Pavement to Plaza is an activist initiative that has intervened in many public spaces in the world. The movement remarks the idea that a high percentage of the urban space is underutilised because of the fact that, amongst other reasons, the streets in many cities are excessively wide. They also highlight that in some urban areas the “streets and public rights-of-way make up 25% of the city’s land area; more space than all the public parks combined”. In this line, they employ several political and low-cost tools in order to transform roads into parks and streets into plazas. They have also negotiated with autorities in Santiago to implement parklets in the streets and carry out streets extention in many urban areas.
Along with this, their website provides the citizens with manuals to encourage social groups to develop this kind of interventions in an independent way. Amongst these manuals, citizens can learn how to build a parklet. They define themselves as a urban laboratory aimed to experiment with new ways of inhabiting the city.
