From left to right, top to bottom: Signage as seating. Building facade as canvas. Underpass as resting place. Parking lot as temporary business. Vacant lot as skatepark. Sidewalk as public podium. Highway underpass as skatepark. Building recess as resting place.


Residual space, activity, intervention.

Free Space

A street level look at interfaces between public and private

Saturday June 5th
3 to 4pm
Tour begins at ART Produce

Free Space is an installation at Art Produce gallery that looks at disparate tactics for appropriating and reclaiming residual spaces in the urban landscape for both public and private use. Residual Spaces are interstices in the city that are abandoned, underutilized, leftover, liminal, and indeterminate. These spaces oscillate between public and private. Residual spaces take the form of alleys, parking lots, building recesses, window ledges, sidewalks, roof tops, fire escapes, blank facades etc. As a starting point, the installation Free Space focuses locally on the residual spaces of C Street in downtown San Diego. This installation uses video documentation, maps, duct tape and furniture to examine these tactics of appropriation.

Join Megan Willis on the Free Space walking tour of North Park's residual spaces. We will tour a handful of sites that have been strategically appropriated, reclaimed, and adapted by North Park residents. By looking at the transformation of these underutilized and overlooked spaces into guerrilla gardens, community art spaces and wheat fields, Free Space encourages people to reexamine the leftover spaces of their neighborhood and question the potential these types of sites may have the urban landscape.