Pop-Up Yoga en Blanc at the Champ de Mars, Eiffel Tower

Pop-up yoga sessions in public spaces have been all the rage recently: Times Square, Bryant Park, Union Square (SF) and now Paris’ Champ de Mars today. The numbers were to be capped at 2000 attendees but many partook in an ad hoc fashion. Yogi Jaimie Schaff was on her way to a Doctors without Borders training in Paris and decided to partake in the White Yoga Session right off the plane. She tells us it was the best cure for jet lag and she got to practice next to an adorable 3 year old.

Public spaces have been recently appropriated for such a variety of ways: as memorial (2,753  empty chairs in Bryant Park for 9/11), as protest (Liberty Park for Occupy Wall Street), as spectacle (The Diner en Blanc in NYC and Paris). These movements are coming both from the ground up and top down, in what is possibly a move towards joint recognition of the necessity for fluid open space programming.