A Parklet is a temporary “park” that occupies the space of one parking spot.

Excessively narrow sidewalks and parked cars make public life on certain streets impossible, and expanding the program of public ground floors into open space is greatly hindered. The Parklets project tested whether there was a need and a desire on particular streets for more space for people rather than for cars. With the project, we opened up public space for wider use: we took one car’s worth of parking space and occupied it, equipping it with a bench and some greenery.

One of the long-term goals in the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan of the City of Ljubljana is reducing the impact of transport on the environment, and the number of parking spaces is a significant part of this plan. By reorganizing the parking space into a temporary “park”, we wanted to meet these guidelines and present a new form of public space, while encouraging residents and visitors to choose other forms of mobility instead of cars to move around the city.

The advantage of temporary installations is that they can be carried out relatively quickly. Most of Ljubljana's streets have electric, telephone, sewerage, and public lighting lines running underneath, which makes it impossible to simply plant trees, as this would require the relocation of all lines to a single canal. As it is, numerous streets can only be greened by using trees in planters.

The temporary parks were set up in cooperation with local park wardens as a part of the Ljubljana Green Capital project. The interventions were carried out at the Rimska, Beethovnova and Igriška streets, Židovska lane and the Gornji trg square. It was a temporary arrangement (May - September 2014) at the peak of the cycling season, when there is smaller need for parking spaces. Nevertheless, the park wardens and users of Parklets wanted to keep the parks, so the municipality extended the project at their request, and the parks remained in place until the end of 2015.