In 2009, the San Francisco Planning Department started to initiate tactics to create a new set of public spaces under the “Pavement to Parks Program”. Utilizing underused portions of the public right of way - about 25% of San Francisco’s land area - each P2P project operated as a public laboratory where the City can work with various communities to test strategies to re-claim selected locations as permanent public open space. San Francisco’s network of more than 9000 fire hydrants creates a significant, legal opportunity to add to the ecological green footprint of every neighborhood and of the city as a whole with-out, violating fire department regulations.

The project creates a framework for community participation by marking hydrants with QR codes, which will feed into a website that informs the public about the project and the potential of a citywide imple-mentation. The digital interface may also allow visitors to drop an idea for additional programs, which would function as a virtual survey.

At the scale of the City of San Francisco, the network of more than 9000 fire hydrants has the potential to create an addition-al ecological green footprint of 10 miles: programmed and implemented in small plots at the community and neighborhood level, without violating fire department regulations. Every square foot of this territory could be a bio-swale, a public pocket space, or a low planting bed. On a citywide level, this could initiate a new Flower-Power movement in which resistance is understood as a productive re-interpretation of existing [unnec-essary] codes in support of the urban ecology.