Shortly after San Francisco’s Urban Prototyping Festival opened Saturday, the garden planter-slash-urinal wasn’t getting much business, but there was a sizable crowd watching the graffiti war unfold and kids were lining up to bounce on the LED-lit hopscotch.
“The kids are really intrigued by these games,” said Stephen Popper as he watched his son and daughter fight over who got to use the hopscotch next. Five-year-old Hannah was winning. Nearby, four graffiti artists were quietly spray-painting colorful designs on 6-foot-tall panels.
The family hadn’t stopped by to visit the urinal yet.
“My son likes anything involving planting. He really liked the fruit fence,” Popper said, referring to the sacks of fruit trees attached to a chain-link fence around the corner from the hopscotch mat. “He wants to do that on the fence at his school now.”
Perhaps only in San Francisco, and only at a street party with “urban prototyping” in the name, could hopscotch, graffiti, fruit fences and garden-style urinals share space. They were among the 23 projects spotlighted at the festival, which was part art installation and part urban experimentation.
The festival began this summer in Singapore, and Saturday’s event was the first stop in the United States, taking up three blocks near Fifth and Mission streets. The idea is to create a “living laboratory” of inventions that transform public spaces and make them useful, educational, interactive or just plain fun.
Turning problems around
Take the garden urinals, for example. The urinals are attached to planters, and the wastewater is filtered and used to water trees or flowers. The idea – which the designers call a “PPlanter” – is to take an urban problem like public urination and turn it into something beneficial.
Down the street was an audio installation that the inventors described as “data sonification,” which is basically using sound as a means of representing data. The inventors mounted 19 speakers to a chain-link fence, each speaker representing a neighborhood in the city. Each speaker issued a sound – like the tides from San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, recorded throughout the day – unique to its neighborhood.
“Hopefully, it just makes you stop and listen to what’s going on in the city,” said Emily Shisko, a San Francisco musician who co-designed the installation. “This could be another means of getting information across, but in a way that’s totally enjoyable.”
Shisko’s project was meant to be both educational and entertaining, while others were more practical – like a spotlight to shine on people using crosswalks at night, or “urban parasols” made of renewable materials to provide shade and shelter.
Many ideas clearly were sprung from the first urban prototype hit: the parklet. These miniparks that transform parking spaces into green zones have blossomed all over San Francisco and, now, the rest of the country. At Saturday’s festival, garden- and park-themed installations were a common sight.
“There are so many opportunities to make the city more livable,” said Mona El Khafif, an urban design professor at California College of the Arts and one of the people behind a project called the “10-mile garden.”
Their proposal is to plant gardens in the streets in front of fire hydrants, which are currently wasted space, El Khafif said. If every fire hydrant in San Francisco had a garden in front of it, all of that space added together would be 10 miles of extra greenery in the city, she said.
Replanting if needed
And if there happens to be an emergency requiring use of a hydrant with a garden in front of it? “The trucks can just run over the garden,” she said. “We’ll replant if we have to.”
But not all urban inventions need take their cues from parklets, festival organizers said. “We don’t need more parklets, we need more parklet-like ideas,” said Alex Michel, director of the 5M Project, which hosted the festival.
“So many people have ideas for civic participation, but there’s nowhere for them to take their ideas,” Michel said, walking among the installations. “This is like a pinball machine. Ideas are bouncing all around here.”
Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: eallday@sfchronicle.com
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