About Park(ing) day for fitness

The mission of the Park(ing) Day for Fitness events is to draw attention to the many (untapped) possibilities that our cities offer for physical activity, the need for more open spaces where people can exercise safely, and further, to provoke a public debate on how to adapt in times of crisis and improve the quality of the urban environment.

The overall objective of the project is to encourage participation and increase public awareness of alternative possibilities to be active in their cities and provide creative opportunities to grassroots and sports operators to promote and deliver active leisure offers.

Park(ing) Day for Fitness was inspired by several initiatives undertaken by BG Be Active Association (BGBA) - the lead partner of the project. In 2017, BGBA set up and championed the long-term program _Spot Bulgaria to transform public spaces from littered and neglected spaces to places for physical activity and recreation. This nationwide programme creates opportunities for people to be active and promotes the creative and sustainable use of public spaces. As a result of tactical placemaking interventions over the past 4-years on the national level, up until 2021, we co-created, with local communities, 40 public places and provided opportunities to use them for leisure and physical activity.

In 2018 in Plovdiv, as partners in the Erasmus+ Movement Spaces project (MOVEment Spaces) led by the International Sports and Culture Association (ISCA), together with five European cities, 5 NGOs, and grassroots sport experts, BGBA piloted the concept of a pop-up fitness park that offered citizens the opportunity to take part in different activities (streetball, table tennis etc.). This pilot intervention served not only as an activation opportunity (engaging more than 6,000 people over 3-days), but BGBA also used the project results to advocate the demand for more public spaces that function to accommodate the needs of people to be active in their everyday lives and in a non-structured context.

As promoting the use of public spaces and improving their functionality is at the core of BGBA’s work following discussions with partners engaged both in public space transformations and multisport-event coordinations and implementations, we decided to continue developing projects and programmes related to strengthening the link between public space and physical activity and respectively between placemakers and grassroots sports operators - thus Park(ing) Day for Fitness was born.

Together with the partners from:

• Netherlands - Placemaking Europe
• Romania - Association Sport for All Suceava (AJSPT Suceava)
• Poland - V4 SPORT Foundation
• France - Azur Sport Sante
• Austria - XsentrikArts

we will coordinate 90 p-spot events, and 6 flagship events in 6 countries.