Abstract
In the Talking Heads song “Animals” from the 1979 album Fear of Music, lyricist David Byrne vents his frustration with critters that “Shit on the ground/See in the dark/They wander around like a crazy dog/Make a mistake in the parking lot”. The song sets up a dialectic between human and animal, nature and civilisation, only to complicate these distinctions by the end. Byrne’s parking lot is a space of order and efficiency. It is that liminal space that provides a necessary transition between the highway that brought you to work or the shopping mall and the place where business, leisure, life itself are conducted. When animals make a mistake in the parking lot, well, it disrupts that seamless transition. While it may seem odd to quote a pop song in a review of an academic text, this is ultimately part of author Eran Ben-Joseph’s strategy of investigating the parking lot as an imaginary space as well as a real, designed location in his book Rethinking A Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking.
Parking lots, as the author demonstrates, have been the subject of renowned art projects (Ed Ruscha and the San Francisco collective REBAR), award winning designs by some of the world’s most famous architects (Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano), Disney cartoons and, yes, rock songs. The book includes the obligatory reference to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (“They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot”). Despite these examples, the author argues that the parking lot actually occupies very little terrain within the popular imaginary. The fact that the lot is paradoxically one of the most ubiquitous spaces of the developed landscape while at the same time one of the least considered is an obvious strength of this book. As Ben-Joseph, a Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT, writes in the introduction In some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area [but] the basics of parking lot design have not been significantly rethought since the 1950s (p. xi).
He states at the outset that the book does not include the parking garage in its analysis but is instead about the surface lot, “a landscape ripe for transformation. Extracting more of its value, embracing its cultural importance and increasing its usefulness are long overdue.” He proceeds to invert the scenario of Mitchell’s famous song by asking the question: “why can’t parking lots be modest paradises?” (p. xii).
The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 offers an overview of various approaches to the planning and design of parking lots, providing concise taxonomies and assessing their everyday uses. The lot is not just a place where automobiles rest. It is an open space, a public commons, used to stage farmers’ markets, music concerts, cookouts, concerts and plays. Part 2 provides historical perspective. As one might expect, the road and the car receive special attention here. But Ben-Joseph traces the origins of parking back to “the management of ancient vehicles and their accommodating surface designs” (p. 53). He notes that the Assyrian King Sennacherib (705-681 BC) banned parked chariots along the Royal Road and that Caesar’s Rome, like contemporary metropolises, was afflicted with traffic congestion necessitating laws that introduced the practice of off-street parking.
Suburbs, highways and shopping centres are the protagonists of Part 2, phenomena that Edward Dimendberg has elsewhere labelled the ‘centrifugal forces’ of post-War urban development. Ben-Joseph explains the paradox of this expansion By the mid-twentieth century, lot design corresponded to changes in urban dynamics, particularly the growth of the suburb and the decline of the city core. The booming growth of suburban development, and its associated auto-centric culture, spurred the decline of central business districts (CBDs) in many cities. This dynamic promoted the tearing-down of vacant buildings and their replacement with surface lots, in hopes of attracting suburbanites back into the city centers with ‘easy parking’ (p. 73).
In other words, downtown’s loss was the parking lot’s gain. The character of the central district was sacrificed for convenience. Now, ironically, cities are rapidly constructing mixed use developments over the very same lots that once displaced functional, architecturally significant buildings in an effort to recapture the density (and diversity) of the downtown core.
Part 3 focuses on innovative and unconventional examples of parking lot design. The emphasis on environmental impact is a welcome culmination to the book. Ben-Joseph provides numerous case studies in which bio-filtration and stormwater management have been built into the design. Likewise, the incorporation of tree canopies, “pervious load-bearing surfaces that allow grass to grow” (p. 121) and “shared space” strategies that encourage multiple uses including children’s play areas, all enhance the aesthetic impact of surface lots.
The text positions itself alongside contemporary studies such as The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form by Shannon MacDonald, The Architecture of Parking by Simon Henley and Sue Barr, as well as the now-canonical evaluations of urban form by Kevin Lynch or Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, all of which the author acknowledges. The book is generously illustrated with colour plates featuring images and graphs that clearly demonstrate historical trends or functional concepts. And the decision to divide the work into brief sub-sections that address the major themes makes it highly readable, even to a non-design-oriented audience. The text would be a useful addition to courses in art and architecture as well as those that address urban form in sociology, cultural studies or even environmental studies.
The attempt to bring some humour into what, for many, is a potentially unexciting topic is appreciated. The book is ripe with puns (“A Lot on My Mind”, “A Lot in Common”, “Lots of Time”, etc.) but a little goes a long way in this regard. Likewise, an analysis of stall dimensions and zoning practices has a tendency to yield dry prose. And while the shorter sub-sections do make the text more accessible, this structure also proves to be a weakness. The author occasionally introduces important issues dealing with gender’s role in the spatial dynamics of parking lots (“Parking Spaces Women’s Places”) and the racial undercurrents of ethnic food trucks that occupy stalls in densely populated areas (“Lots of Eating”). But these brief overviews lasting no more than a few paragraphs ultimately feel underdeveloped. All too often parking lots can contribute to social inequality or the isolation and segregation of marginalised communities. The lot’s rapid ascent as spatial form, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was representative of cultural shifts related to racial and class divisions and changing gender roles. Lots were signifiers of White flight for suburban shoppers parked outside retail centres and thereby avoiding the urban core. Likewise, the design of these spaces often discouraged those daily commuters utilising downtown lots that abutted courthouses, office buildings or school campuses from any meaningful social interactions with the surrounding neighbourhoods.
It is also important to acknowledge that the lot is a space already marked by differences and hierarchies. In addition to the designers and architects, there is a labour force that builds and maintains these spaces. Attendants and valets, construction crews and security guards, city inspectors and the homeless all make up the perpetually transient populations of the parking lot. At one point, Ben-Joseph writes Design is seldom practiced in a homogeneous space. Progressing from the specificity of the site to an idea, a program, and a plan requires a discursive process where boundaries are kept fluid (p. 96).
But the question of how to initiate this discursive process or how to incorporate these various voices to account for the heterogeneity of the lot is left unanswered. If, as Ben-Joseph asserts, the lot can become a new kind of public commons, this would necessitate an analysis that accounts for the power dynamics embedded within policy and design strategies. To be fair, this is beyond the purview of Ben-Joseph’s book, but coupling his text with more in-depth examinations of one or two of these issues might yield a more nuanced approach to design.
The end of the book raises important questions about the place of the lot in a world confronted by climate change, austerity measures and increasing globalisation. Should we build more and better lots? Or should we find new and better modes of transport that would obviate the building of lots altogether? Ben-Joseph’s thought-provoking text acknowledges that society is a long way from implementing the latter. Our century-long love affair with the automobile is hardly over. Parking lots are at once everywhere and ‘nowhere’. In the meantime, we should focus our attention on better utilising and reimagining those overlooked, underappreciated spaces that inhabit our landscape but not our consciousness.