According to Vancouver’s Preliminary Resilience Assessment, there is a need for innovation to ensure our communities are healthy, connected, and resilient. With cities becoming denser, public spaces must be creatively re-imagined to support residents within their community. Vancouver’s Healthy City Strategy found that only 42% of residents between the ages of 18-39 feel safe and included in their communities. Parklets are one way to revive city space and connect community, by turning parking spots into places for people. Parklets offer three main benefits, creating vibrant and walkable spaces, increasing foot traffic for local businesses, and fostering a sense of community.

However, the current parklet application process is complicated, time intensive, and expensive. Small businesses meet difficult expectations and high costs by the end of the design process. Street Seats aims to deliver a low-barrier solution for businesses by offering a pre-approved parklet design. Think of it as a blank parklet template, for businesses to tailor to their customers’ needs. With Street Seats, each business pays a flat monthly rate for their parklet, with the opportunity to renew the contract each year. We estimate that small businesses will pay 40% less with us, than the current process.

Street Seats evolved over the course of 5 prototypes and 35 interviews, with input from the public and local businesses. The student team chose to pursue Street Seats because of its passion for creating community connections and activating public spaces.