On a September day in 2025, a handful of parking spaces in downtown Atlanta and near Georgia Tech in Midtown stopped being parking spaces. They became miniature parks — furnished with games, music, puzzles, and a clothing swap — as part of Park(ing) Day, an annual international urban design project that asks a simple, provocative question: what could cities do with the land they dedicate to storing empty cars?
The Atlanta activations were organized by the Georgia Tech Student Planning Association, the Atlanta Department of City Planning, and ATLDOT, the city's transportation department. Olivia Phillips of the Georgia Tech planning group described the purpose directly: "Show them how much space cars and parking actually takes up, and what we could do with this space instead."
Micro Acts of Civil Joy
The phrase came from the organizers, and it captured the spirit of the event. The transformed parking spots were small — a few hundred square feet each — but they functioned as proof of concept. People sat. They talked. They met strangers. They did the things that public spaces are supposed to enable but that parking lots, by design, prevent.
"They're meant for people to talk, sit down, meet new people, do stuff," Phillips said — a description that could apply to any great public space but that sounded radical when applied to a rectangle of asphalt with a meter attached.
ATLDOT Commissioner Solomon Caviness attended, lending institutional weight to an event that started as guerrilla urbanism in San Francisco in 2005. Attendee Melinda Wharton noted that Atlanta was ready for this kind of experimentation, pointing to Atlanta Streets Alive and the BeltLine as evidence that the city's residents want more human-scaled public space, not less.
The Downtown Connection
Downtown Atlanta has more surface parking lots per square block than almost any other major American downtown. Park(ing) Day does not pretend that converting a few spots for an afternoon will change that. But it makes the invisible visible: every parking space is a land-use decision, and every land-use decision is reversible.
Park(ing) Day returns in September 2026 — and in a downtown that is adding residents, trails, and mixed-use development faster than at any point in its history, the question of what to do with all that parking is no longer theoretical.
Original reporting by Amanda Andrews, Georgia Public Broadcasting, September 25, 2025.