City Repair’s Depave program reclaims paved land for gardens and community space.

Evidence

In Portland, Oregon, an organization called City Repair is creatively working on ways to reclaim the cultural and environmental commons. Its mission statement says it best: City Repair is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live. City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented place making through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. … An interesting recent project of City Repair is “Depave,” which does just what it sounds like. Depave’s goal is to reclaim land from pavement, by organizing groups to assist in removal of unnecessary pavement from schools, businesses, and homes and reclaiming the land for community use as gardens or other public spaces. As Depave points out, “The removal of impervious pavements will reduce storm water pollution and increase the amount of land available for habitat restoration, urban farming, trees, native vegetation, and beauty, thus providing us with greater connec - tions to the natural world” (Retrieved on July 2, 2010 from http://depave. org/blog/about). — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1801

Categorization

• XREF: Depaving connects directly to the trees-in-false-infrastructure thread from Grafting & Growth and to the reader’s Detroit food-desert work in ch36—turning pavement back into living land.
• SEED: Concrete school-partnership project model: students repurposing parking lots as habitat—a ready classroom activity to operationalize eco-justice theory.