“Parking Day” is an annual and international event where people temporarily transform parking spaces into “Park(ing)” spaces: temporary public spaces.
- It takes place on the third Friday of September every year.
- The landscape architecture student society in AUB celebrates this day every year by taking a parking space somewhere in Beirut and transforming it into a public space to raise awareness about the importance of public spaces in Lebanon.
- Every year, this event leaves a great impact on people’s lives. They start noticing the importance of having green and public spaces around them as well as walkable, livable, and healthy communities. They learn to rethink how streets can be used and they realize that having the right to sit in a healthy and green public space is much more important than having the right to be given parking spaces for their cars. Seeing how parking spaces can be beautiful and full of life encourages people to ask for more of such initiatives.
- The landscape society learns every year new event management techniques after the “Parking Day”, especially that this event is considered to be one of the hardest events, as it requires a lot of work to get approvals from the municipality and other entities.
- The society has developed the skills of paying attention to small details when planning an event to leave a memorable impression, the skills of solving a sudden problem that could pop up without previous warning and the skills of engaging people in the event.
- Although the purpose of this event was not to gain money as much as it was to celebrate this day and prove our presence, the society managed to get a small profit from the activity practiced on site. This event has been always introducing us as Landscape Architects and exposing us to the outer world, letting people know about our efforts made every day to make of Lebanon a healthier and greener place to live in.