Book Review: Rethinking A Lot
Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, is a book that looks at a banal, yet salient feature of our present day cities, the parking lot, and makes a case for why and how these sites are crucial nodes for intervention and regeneration in our often bleak and desolate, urban environments. Its author, Eran Ben Joseph has been head of the planning and urban studies department at MIT from 2013 to 2020 where he taught courses in sustainable site planning technologies, urban retrofitting, urban and physical design and standards and regulations. Parallely he has also authored and co authored other books namely, ReNew Town: Adaptive Urbanism and the Low Carbon Community, The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making and Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities while also leading national and international multidisciplinary projects Singapore, Barcelona and Washington DC amongst other places. Published in 2012, the book’s primary area of study is the United States in conjunction with other developed countries in the western hemisphere. It looks at the advent of the automobile and the ways in which cities have morphed to accommodate their growing needs.
This book is divided into three sections, each cleverly named using a pun on the word ‘lot’. The first section, ‘A lot in Common’, establishes the context for the rest of the book with interesting facts and infographics, revealing how deeply embedded parking spaces are to American cities. According to a survey cited by the author, the average American city dedicates as much as 40% of its land solely to parking spaces including that which is on-street, making parking lots one of the most commonplace urban experiences in the country. The author then talks about how their functionalities have evolved over time to accommodate the myriad needs of the people of the city from boondockers and tailgaters to farmers marketeers, youngsters wanting to party, catholic christians wanting to pray and local entrepreneurs wanting to sell their wares. This section culminates with a note on how the parking lot is often the first and last impression most people have of a place, making it all the more vital to pay careful attention to their design and aesthetic.
The second section called ‘Lots of Time’ looks at transport policy and infrastructure historically, going as far back as 705 BCE when the Assyrian king Sennacherib made a rule preventing people from parking their animals and chariots along a 24meter wide road within his kingdom. The section then goes on to describe how the ‘bicycle craze era’ in the 1890s contributed to the experimentation on, and development of, roads across American cities, followed by an etymology of the word ‘park’ and how it evolved from having a seemingly pleasant connotation of landscaped greenery into the idea of a stationary vehicle. The author then discusses how governments negotiated mandatory parking policies in downtown or CBD areas of cities and the way in which womens’ predispositions of having had historically been condemned to the domestic realm shaped parking reforms that came up during the early 1900s. After thoroughly taking the reader through many years of policy and development in the area of vehicular parking, this section finally culminates by describing tried and tested methods to mitigate the lot’s adverse effects on the environment.
In the third and last section of the book, titled ‘lots of excellence’ the author presents concrete examples of ways in which artists, designers and innovators have been engaging with the parking lot in the recent past as sites ripe with opportunity. These examples include works by notable architects like Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano, the latter of whom has been cited for his redesign of the Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy, where he successfully integrates the building into its surroundings using landscaping as a means to organise vehicular parking in the adjacent open areas. The author further describes grassroots movements such as the ‘Shakespeare’s Lot’ and an annual Park(ing) day event in San Francisco where participants rent parking spaces for uses alternative to that of parking as a way to question space allocation in cities. Other interventions include making the lot into a space with flexible functionalities inspired by Colin Buchanan’s idea of a ‘shared street’, overlaying the parking lot grid with that of an orchard for added aesthetic value and methods by which to prevent stormwater runoff using de-piping techniques.
All in all, this book gives its reader an expansive understanding of all things parking, making it a very handy reference for anyone engaging within this area of research.