When most people dream of a garden, they picture lush lawns, shaded arbors, and plump vegetable patches. But for a group of students at the California College of the Arts, their vision of a garden began with the potholes at the intersection of Van Ness and Division Streets in San Francisco.
Pothole Gardens is a project intended to draw attention to the priorities of road repair in the city while greening particularly polluted urban spaces. The Gardens also present a challenge to vehicular traffic—will the driver swerve to preserve the greenery? Slow down to marvel? Or will he be oblivious to the intervention entirely?
It’s a small, inconvenient gesture that presents an alternate urban environment. On the project website the students critique the city’s expensive focus on constructing and maintaining asphalt roads which give priority to the individual car rather than other forms of transit. San Francisco has over 900 paved miles, half of which need some restoration on an annual basis. In the fiscal year of 2005, the Department of Public Works (DPW) filled 17,858 potholes at an average cost of $41.80 per pothole. The repairs required 2800 trips around the city and used around 4,000 tons of asphalt.
When the environmental costs of destructive asphalt mining and the litigation costs that result from pothole traffic accidents are accounted for, the whole enterprise of road paving seems massively consumptive and wasteful. If many of our roads could be reclaimed for healthier, greener purposes, could we change our car-centric vision?
You can join the project and spread the gardens around the city. Check this Google Map to find a pothole near you.
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When most people dream of a garden, they picture lush lawns, shaded arbors, and plump vegetable patches. But for a group of students at the California College of the Arts, their vision of a garden began with the potholes at the intersection of Van Ness and Division Streets in San Francisco.
