What's the Difference Between a Parking Lot and a Playground?

‘Urban hactivist’ Florian Rivière and his DIY guerrilla tactics have transformed even the most ponderous of urban spaces and artifacts into gags, visual puns, and humorous critique. Rivière’s latest project “Don’t Pay, Play” divines sports complexes out of the checkered parking spaces of car parks, rendering what is generally perceived as one of the city’s greatest, yet unavoidable ills into potential public spaces.

Using just white tape and shopping carts, Rivière creates a series of playing fields, each of which inhabits a single parking space of a Strasbourg parking lot. The fields can be identified by their diagrammatic markings, which Rivière scrawls out in playful linework. There’s a football pitch, a hockey rink, a waterpolo pool, and a pair of tennis and basketball courts, all arrayed in an alternating pattern.

All photographs courtesy Julie Roth via designboom

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner site.