Joining a Global Movement: Students bring sustainable designs to Block 34
Friday, December 19, 2025
Media Contact: Sophia Fahleson | Digital Communications Specialist | 405-744-7063 | sophia.fahleson@okstate.edu
The community expected parked cars. Instead, a row of parking spaces at Block 34 was filled with three mini exhibits featuring a couch, a prairie field of plastic bottles, and a fence of hay bales and pallets. All displays were designed and built by students with something to say.
In September 2025, Oklahoma State University landscape architecture students participated in a global movement known as Park(ing) Day.
Park(ing) Day occurs annually on the third Friday of September. Across the world people repurpose parking spaces into art exhibits to advocate for a safer, greener environment. The goal is to create conversations around sustainability and a community-centered urban design.
The chosen location for this year’s event was Block 34 in downtown Stillwater, Oklahoma. The newly developed community park, in collaboration with the City of Stillwater, provided parking spaces where landscape architecture students could set up their displays for the day.
“This is a global movement that our students get to be a part of,” said Bo Zhang, OSU landscape architecture associate professor, who led the event. “This movement started in 2005 in San Francisco and has reached all across the world.”
The annual event aims to “reclaim urban space,” and expanded to New York City in 2009, according to the Park(ing) Day website. Some New York City Park(ing) Day spaces became permanent; now the day has been celebrated annually worldwide by thousands, according to the website.
As community members arrived in downtown Stillwater, students guided them through each of their exhibits, relaying the sustainable intentions behind the designs.
“Within landscape architecture, we were all just fighting to help our purpose become known,” said Chloe Meyer, landscape architecture senior. “It is a way to find community.”
Park(ing) Day is about more than displaying the urban designs, Meyer said, adding it is a place to connect with the community members and advocate for landscape architecture.
“It is great for awareness, because every time someone asks me my major and I tell them landscape architecture, they have never heard of it. It is a great way of telling what we do through a fun act of service,” said Regan Shepard, landscape architecture senior.
Meyer said the exhibits also helped students demonstrate sustainable practices to the community.
“If you think about it, it is a way to bring everybody together and see all the different ideas everybody has,” Meyer said.
“Depending on the context of where you go and set up, students can collaborate with a lot of different businesses,” she added. “Some of our students did that, resourcing different materials and functions.”
This year, three groups were formed based on the top three designs submitted by students. The students with winning designs were tasked with guiding their group members to bring their ideas to life.
Each installation told its own story using reusable materials found on campus or around Stillwater, revealing how landscapes can connect people to simple places, like a parking space.
“The goal is to raise awareness about the need for more public green spaces, to highlight environmental concerns in our urban areas, and to imagine alternatives that prioritize people, ecology and community,” Zhang said.
The groups transformed three concrete parking stalls into creative spaces, encouraging the community to view their surroundings in a new way.
The recycled and salvaged designs not only caught the eyes of people walking by but also linked the OSU campus to an international conversation on how public spaces can better serve people.
Meyer designed the project “The Prairie Mosaic,” a creative installation inspired by the region’s native landscapes. The group members who helped Meyer with the project were landscape architecture seniors, including Garrett Blair, Tanner Lam and Kaylee Morris.
“Our Park(ing) Day installations stemmed from individual concepts that each person in our group decided to use,” Meyer said.
The group studied the fading prairie landscape and the lasting effects of human activity. For the project, they used more than 300 recycled plastic bottles, collected from Legacy Hall, to symbolize the waste generated in daily life, she said.
“I decided to play off the eco tones of Oklahoma historically to tell a short story for people to experience,” Meyer said. “It is making a statement about the reuse of constant materials, while also stating how we can recreate nature, but can never truly cover up the damage that we have done.”
Bustani Plant Farm, located in Stillwater, loaned plants for the exhibit to add color and life to the display, Morris said. Morris said the purpose was to demonstrate the potential for renewal, even in the face of environmental challenges.
“By utilizing natural elements, like the plants, with reusable materials, we wanted to create a reminder of both loss and resilience in the prairies,” said Blair, a landscape architecture senior who worked with Meyer on “The Prairie Mosaic” project.
While one installation asked viewers to reflect on the resilience of the prairies and human impact on natural spaces, another group shifted the focus inward, emphasizing nostalgia, said Shepard, a member of the group.
“When we first heard about the idea of ‘civic joy,’ we got together as a group, and the first thing that came to mind was children,” Shepard said. “They experience the most joy.”
Capturing childhood memories, the group displayed a couch, childhood photograph and a snack bar to resemble a living room.
“We went for an enchanted forest feel, something that is very cozy and comfortable, something you could go to and be at peace in,” Shepard said.
The group encouraged viewers to pause and connect in an environment that had once been a parking spot, she added. The transformed space became a spot for reconnecting with nostalgic childhood memories.
Also in the team were landscape architecture seniors, Chloe Tyler, Hattie Witherell and Chloe Campbell.
The final senior group, led by Kristofer-Andrew McKinley, along with group members Nohelia Hernandez and Laken Crane, designed an installation to provoke questions about food security.
As a visual aspect, they created “a rustic farm feel achieved through the use of hay bales and salvaged shipping pallets, capturing the essence of a patched fence and stacks of hay,” McKinley said.
The purpose of the rustic design was to “inform everyone about the produce they can grow locally and demonstrate the methods for growing it,” McKinley said.
By showcasing locally grown produce, McKinley said the group created a space that honored agriculture’s history while demonstrating practical steps toward a sustainable future .
Park(ing) Day provides students with hands-on training and real-world experience in urban design and community engagement, Zhang said.
“Park(ing) Day also significantly raises the visibility of OSU and our commitment to sustainability and creating urban environments for the future,” Zhang said.
Story by: McKenna Blair | Cowboy Journal