What happens to a neighborhood when we prioritize people over parking? From Grey to Green is a temporary tactical urbanism intervention in a peripheral neighborhood of Utrecht transforming part of a side-street and its surrounding car parking into a neighborhood garden.

Within the European REALLOCATE project —a HORIZON research initiative involving ten different EU cities— Gemeente Utrecht is exploring and testing ways to renovate school streets through greening and transforming car parking into public space. The project addresses the difficult trade-off between vehicle storage and high-quality living space for children and residents using tactical urbanism and small-scale participation experiments in different areas.

One of these experiments is in Kanaleneiland, in front of De Kaleidoskoop school. Here, together with Aanpact, we have developed a temporary intervention that transforms a section of the street and its surrounding parking into a small garden filled with wooden benches, plants and a playing path.

The project was developed with designers Aanpact, who contributed their signature hands-on, fresh style. The goal was “to stitch the sidewalks together”. With the aim of making the space safe and visible, the design mimics a green island, with a square-like shape and lots of colour. The floor is covered in artificial grass, and framed with reused wooden beams sourced from a circular construction provider. The benches and elements in the space have different heights and shapes inviting visitors to rest and be active in them.

The aim of the pilot is to research how school environments are currently experienced and test how temporary improvements in public space –using design thinking and participatory methods–  can pave the way for long-term transformations of the city. In this context, the intervention in Kanaleneiland isn't just a physical change, but a strategic evolution for the Municipality of Utrecht to strengthen its innovation capacity, moving away from rigid planning and towards more agile, iterative methodologies.

This is aligned with our belief that tactical urbanism is more than quick interventions in public space – it is a method to accelerate urban transitions by combining strategic goals, co-created future ideas, and communicative concepts with visible interventions. Our approach ensures that experiments are not only playful and accessible, but also strategically designed to build legitimacy, mobilise people, and inform long-term change.