1st of October, 6 – 7 pm, 6018 North Kenmore Ave., Chicago.
On the first day of the intervention Jakob Wirth will present the concept of the project and its background and will talk as well about its Parasitic Strategy.
The platform can transform and adapt to its environment as well as its use at any time: as a living space, a stage, a cafe or simply an apparent parking lot. Parasite Parking is an uninvited guest on the spaces that are available to all of us and yet are usually occupied only by steel bodies of modernity.
For additional information on this project, please visit parasite-parking.net.
The project considers both vacant and privatized space, referring especially to the privatization of the parking spaces in the city of Chicago (leased to a private investor for 75 years until 2084) and the implicated loss of public governance of huge parts of the public space.
Conceptually, Parasite Parking questions who owns the city and who has access to it: not only in terms of access to housing, but also access to infrastructure, to the design of the public space and to the political decisions that determine it. It seems to be obvious that space divides cities. Gentrification is a spatial phenomenon and one of the prominent dynamics currently leading to segregation, besides preceding mechanisms like redlining and racism.