Book Review: Paved Paradise

After 10 years away from this blog (parenting, coaching, etc., not neglect or the indulgence in an old Hummer), I am prompted to at least post a brief missive here about a book I have recently finished.  I have been keeping up my walking bonafides, aspiring to do a full-day walk within the city limits and been reading regularly on walking as well over the years.  

I am currently reading Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust which aspires to give a history of walking, but I have also recently completed Harry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World which easily caught my attention and, once I got into its pages, rewarded me with the author's richly-detailed, data-laden examination of parking and its impacts primarily on American cities.  Reading it has made re-engaged my consciousness about the spaces that I walk through and see in the the city, particularly in the East Village, which has promised to be an area of informed urban development, but still has remnants of infrastructure from earlier times that has sustained deep-rooted blight in that part of the city.  A couple of those blights centre around parking structures and I may revisited those places a little more critically when the opportunity arises.

Paved Paradise (2023) is all the more timely given the challenges that many cities in Canada, including Calgary, are facing with housing shortages that are contributing to exceptionally low vacancy rate, escalating rents and other challenges.  Drawing direct links between parking and housing shortages may be a challenge, but after examining the phenomena that merged with the development of the first parking a 100 years ago, the book becomes revelatory when outlining the foundering efforts to build low affordable housing for people who had been evicted from their homes.  After a protracted, decade-long process to gain approval of a residential development, one that required the replacement of parking spaces that would be taken out of use by rehousing these people on a proposed space, the costs of the additional parking to compensate for the lost parking and, additionally provide the required residential parking for the building as well, the project was scuttled when the per unit costs of the development rose to over US$800,000.  This in a country where there are, depending on the estimates, approximately 6 parking spaces for every vehicle in the United States -- a glut of infrastructure, that apart from skewing the layout and dynamics of communities, buildings and homes, is never used to more than 17% of its capacity.  Despite its abundance, however, it never seems to be where a driver wants it to be and is deemed overpriced the very moment it is not free.

The space, money and social equality squandered in the name of free parking all supports the case that there needs to be a close reconsideration of parking and the misplaced preeminence it has been given. Grabar's examination of parking is historical, architectural, urbanist and assertively insightful as he points out the thoughtlessness, hypocrisy, occasional criminality and entitlement that has been baked into attitudes about free parking for over a century. Apart from the book's ability to infuriate at times, whether outlining the City of Chicago's moronic move to grant a 75-year lease of parking meters investors lead by a Wall Street bank or the way parking codes -- which seems as informed and data-grounded as the determinations of phrenologists -- have priced people out of housing or sustainable development. It may be a book that one might designate for "parking geeks," but it is quite accessible when compared to the books and articles that Grabar refers to at times within the book.  Considering how impactful parking and the accommodation of the car is on all of our lives it is an informative, valuable read.