Good Spot
A community car park where profits made go straight into placemaking projects in the area. Featuring real human parking attendants, too!
Putting profit into projects in the neighbourhood
Conceived and created by Gap Filler, GOOD SPOT is a central city car park in Fletcher Living’s new One Central neighbourhood. It is but one of the many projects Gap Filler has conceived and delivered as part of its Placemaking at One Central programme in partnership with Fletcher Living. This is a series of activations and events for those sites in One Central awaiting future development, using fallow land to enable positive community outcomes. The carpark puts its profits back into supporting community projects between 50m and 500m from the carpark. Gap Filler was required to leave some One Central sites as temporary car parking. Rather than continue to contract Wilson’s Parking for this, Gap Filler and Fletcher Living (who are developing the land) hatched plans for a different sort of car park that would be better for the local community. .
Parking attendants doing GOOD
Good Spot has real, human parking attendants each morning across the rush hour period to say hello, lend a hand, clean windscreens and help build the Good Spot community. Members of community development organisation, Te Whare Roimata work alongside members of the Inner City East community at GOOD SPOT (and elsewhere), supporting them with social connectivity and helping them to gain confidence. Jono Kitt is part of the Te Whare Roimata team. He spends three mornings a week at GOOD SPOT working alongside Niggy and Robin, two people working hard to overcome various life challenges. They find quality time at GOOD SPOT is a really positive start to their day. With support from Te Whare Roimata, Robin is gaining confidence and becoming involved in his community which means giving back and helping others who are experiencing similar journeys. He is now deeply involved with the ICECycles project as a volunteer bike mechanic. ICECycles is a Te Whare Roimata project that provides free bike repairs and fixes up bikes that are then donated to the transport deprived, low income community of the Inner City East. The money that Te Whare Roimata earns from Good Spot goes towards supporting community members and into funding projects such as ICECycles. In Jono’s view, GOOD SPOT is providing opportunities for people that might otherwise be socially isolated to have a wide range of social interactions. “The interactions go both ways” says Jono. “It’s great that people from different walks of life can enjoy a laugh together in the morning and a clean windscreen!” And it’s the spontaneity of the interactions that Jono thinks is so important in these modern times, where interactions are often virtual, mediated through a screen and keyboard.
Who, what, where, when
Date: Late 2016 – present
