Abstract
Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor and head of the department of landscape architecture and urban planning at MIT, had a lot on his mind when he wrote Rethinking a Lot. This is an optimist’s book providing a fresh look at the ubiquitous and mundane parking lots in America, which are becoming ripe for redevelopment. Typically, parking lots have been cursed in the planning literature as destroyers of our urban fabric, economically unwise investments, and the bane of automobile-dependent urbanization and industrialization. In this book, the author has examined the parking lot from a multitude of perspectives, including history, culture, lifestyle, utilitarian value, aesthetics, design, landscape, and the environment, and particularly dwells on what it has come to mean to the American way of living. Accepting that it will not be possible to rid ourselves of the vast amount of parking that we have created since cars became the preferred mode of travel, the author suggests that the best option is to transform them into vibrant, creative, useful, and sustainable public spaces. The book is written in three parts: “A Lot in Common,” “Lots of Time,” and “Lots of Excellence.”
The first part, “A Lot in Common,” describes how the ubiquitous surface parking lot has come to dominate the urban landscape. Parking lots dominate a third of our built urban environment, yet it is surprising how little thought actually goes into their planning and design. They are over-abundant, monotonous, ignored, devoid of creativity, and usually negative spaces around buildings, remnants after the overall building design has been accomplished. In this section, Ben-Joseph also illustrates parking lot design approaches that have been taken and their cultural significance in the almost one hundred years since the automobile first appeared on the urban scape. The author does an excellent job highlighting the myriad of issues related to parking, ranging from the mediocrity of parking to its oversupply. Surprisingly, the mundane, featureless, generic, and unappealing character of parking lots has come to be appreciated and valued in its own way, and culturally celebrated through community events, music, food, and festivals. But barring some examples, architects and designers have yet to do justice to something that is such a massive part of our public sphere and urban landscape. They are “so ordinary and familiar that we ignore their existence” (9), except when we need and cannot find them. Ignoring the issue of oversupply, zoning and questionable Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) handbooks have led to the wasteful practice of providing four parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of building area, even though only about half to two-thirds are used at peak demand. A University of California, Berkeley, study estimated a mid-range scenario of a staggering 500 million off-street spots in the United States, covering more than 3,500 square miles. Such a pattern indicates that nationwide parking is designed for peak holiday shopping, rather than everyday use.
Regulations stipulating minimum parking requirements are a massive drain on valuable land resources, but they also inflate the cost of building; each spot provided can cost from about $4,000 for surface parking to about $30,000 for underground parking. Vast paved surfaces are also responsible for ecological damage by accelerating storm water runoff and preventing ground water recharge, causing downstream flooding, polluting fresh water sources, and creating heat island effects and light pollution. In spite of all this, the parking lot has come to symbolize the good American life, sometimes becoming the hub for block parties and music, food kiosk and trucks, weekend farmer markets, afterhours play areas, football game celebrations and tailgating, community socials, barbeques, yard sales, and so many other activities. In this section, Ben-Joseph convincingly establishes the argument for rethinking the lot by presenting planning and design approaches, the cultural attitudes, functional uses, environmental impacts, aesthetics, and the social influences of the parking lot. In the second section, “Lots of Time,” the author examines the oversupply of parking spaces and the manner in which they have crept into the zoning-regulated built environment over the last few decades. Beginning in the 1920s, surface parking lots have become a part of the policy that guides design and space requirements. Parking lots even pre-date the car, as they were first designed to accommodate the ancient vehicles during the Roman Empire; however, it was only after the rapid acceptance of the automobile that parking was regulated by ordinances and punitive measures. The use of off-street parking increased in order to reduce the menace and congestion associated with curbside parking. Since mid-twentieth century, suburban malls offered free and plentiful parking, which aided the economic boom outside of the city centers. As a result, many downtown areas were cleared and turned into temporary lots, neglected, and have been awaiting redevelopment that has been slow to come. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were attempts to improve the parking lots through geometrical configuration and paving design guidelines, but parking lot landscaping was rarely addressed. Awareness of runoff-induced pollution led to ideas for ecological improvements and integrating natural systems in site planning. More recently, since the 1990s, ideas of smart growth and sustainability have influenced parking lots supply, management, and design. Ben-Joseph weaves together a historical account of the formation and development of the lot, the emergence of off-street parking and parking regulations, and the urban morphology shift from the early city core parking lots to the emergence of the suburban-style parking lots.
In the book’s last section, “Lots of Excellence,” the author presents examples of a few great parking lots that have emerged to mitigate the environmental impact associated with large, unbroken paved surfaces. These are more flexible and innovative in design, and they serve as multipurposed areas or provide ecological gains. For example, some parking lots have doubled as farmers markets, play areas for street hockey, tailgating spaces, and nighttime party venues. Some parking lots integrate architecture, landscape, art, and parking treatments to serve as a gateway and improve arrival experiences. Some are designed to be safe, pedestrian-friendly spaces and double as parks, plazas, and boulevards. Specific examples include a parking lot that is also a square and plaza in Cambridge, Massachusetts; lots that are flexible and shared spaces with traffic calming measures in Delft, Netherlands; lots that provide space for events in New York; lots that serve as a music venue in Austin, Texas; and lots that provide a setting for public art and sculpture in Hamden, Connecticut.
In addition to providing multipurposed areas, parking lots can also be used to provide ecological advantages. In the past, parking lots have been targeted by activists (parking day demonstrations) to protest America’s car-based culture and lack of open spaces. In order to rethink their environmental impacts, some parking lots are being built to reduce their paved area, increase trees and vegetation, and improve storm water management to reduce runoff. Specific examples include the Sun Life stadium in Miami, Florida; Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas; and Zenith Concert Hall in Limoges, France. Standards such as LEED and CALGreen also reflect these objectives, and municipal codes stipulate tree planting and shaded area. The redesigning of parking lots reducing their environmental impacts can help America deal with the amount of land the twentieth century devoted to personal automobiles. Each example consists of a description and rich visual representations of the innovative aspects of the project which provide useful redevelopment ideas for practitioners. The examples are illustrative, and meant to highlight the potential of what a parking lot could be.
In Rethinking A Lot, Ben-Joseph does not condemn the evils of the automobile culture, nor does he advocate an alternative urban existence; he focuses on making what we already have and what is not going away more attractive, sustainable, and multifunctional. The book is straightforward and easy to follow, and it contains numerous examples of well-designed parking lots from the United States and Europe that are aesthetically pleasing as well as sustainable. However, it would have been nice to see some examples of innovatively designed lots from other parts of the world such as Latin America and Asia. The book’s numerous photographs and diagrams contribute to the explanation of parking lot evolution and symbolism and illustrate a wide range of design approaches. Currently, books on quantitative traffic engineering requirements and parking policy, economics, supply, and pricing dominate the parking literature, so this book fills an important gap. It is of value to planners, architects, and designers who have been reluctant to acknowledge the physical quality and urban design potential of parking lots.