Some folks who live, work or play downtown were greeted with a pleasant surprise Friday as they strolled down Barnard or Bull Street or hunted for a parking space. Six teams of SCAD architecture students “rented” downtown parking spaces from 9 a.m. to noon and, instead of filling the space with a sedan or a pickup, set up public-use spaces that everyone could enjoy. Everything from lawn furniture to board games occupied the parking spaces, encouraging community participation and the reassessment of how we use our public space—sidewalks, streets, parking spaces, all of it—from the edge of one building to the next.

The movement is part of PARK(ing) Day 2012 an international event that originated in 2005 when an architecture firm in San Francisco called Rebar wanted to draw attention to an underused parking space and encourage a more creative use for the space that better served the area’s residents.

Scott Singeisen, the SCAD architecture professor who headed up Savannah’s PARK(ing) Day, says that the goal of the project is really to try to change people’s minds. “We want to get people thinking about extending parks out of these controlled areas that we call squares and expanding them out into the rest of the public space,” he says.

Anna Gosselin and her partner Tae Myung teamed up with the Savannah Bicycle Campaign to provide a temporary bike rack available for use in their rented space. “We want to advocate the creation of more bike lanes and more walking space,” Gosselin says.

The idea behind the project is also to maximize the use of these areas in partnership with the businesses who call downtown home. Daniel Prager and his partner spoke with the owners of Goose Feathers Café to determine how they would like to see the space in front of their business utilized. The answer? More outdoor seating—due to certain city restrictions, the sidewalk seating for the popular café is very limited, so students created additional benches and tables where patrons could enjoy their morning coffee or pastry. “The whole idea isn’t to protest anything,” Prager says, “Just to say, ‘have you thought about this lately?’”

To view a map of where the parking spaces were located, go to their Google map.