do it yourself
a car park
After six it belongs to nobody, which is as close to an invitation as a city gets.
A car park is a room with the roof taken off: flat, hard, drains, takes fire and mess better than grass, and empty at exactly the hour people are free. What it has none of is shade, seats or softness — and those are what turn a surface into somewhere people stay. After dark, one lit thing in the middle of an empty lot does more than any poster.
what it takes
- chalk, to draw the room before you build it: where you cook, where people sit, where they come in
- seats for twenty out of whatever is around — pallets, crates, the back of a van
- one light, and a lead long enough to put it where you want people to stand
- shade for the hours before dusk: a tarp, or the wall that is already dark
- trestle tables, or doors on crates
- something to cook on, kept off the tarmac on bricks and a tray
- water in two containers, one to cook with and one to wash up
- a broom
Borrowed beats bought, every time, and nothing on this list has to match anything else on it. Half of it is not cooking equipment: the chalk, the game, the one light and the spare seat are what turn a place into an evening.
what to do
- Find the hour it empties, and take that hour. Every car park has one.
- Draw the room in chalk first. Ten minutes with chalk saves an evening of people standing in the wrong place.
- Build the seating before the kitchen. Nobody stays in a car park to admire a stove; they stay because there is somewhere to sit down.
- Put one light where you want people to gather and leave the rest dark. That is the whole architecture of the evening.
- Cook in the middle rather than along an edge, so arriving means walking into the thing rather than up to a counter.
- Keep fire off tarmac unless the ground is concrete: two bricks and a tray is the difference between an evening and a repair bill.
- Bring the sound yourself, on the ground, quiet enough to talk over.
- Ask everybody who arrives for a hand within a minute of them arriving. In a place with no walls, being useful is how people belong.
- Sweep, wash where you cooked, take everything with you. A car park you leave clean is a car park you get again.
and then
Send us a photograph of the people, not of the food. That is the whole ask — no forms, no affiliation, nothing to join. If you want a hand first, the handbook is the long version of this, and asking us costs nothing.
This page is meant to be passed on. Its address is www.promenoodology.com/do-it-yourself/a-car-park.