Summary of Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar: How Parking Explains the World E-Book

SUMMARY GP

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar: How Parking Explains the World

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Henry Grabar's investigation into the modern American city's parking crisis reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems, from housing affordability to the global climate disaster. He surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, and reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems, ultimately lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.

Leseprobe

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar: How Parking Explains the World

Henry Grabar's investigation reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems, leading to the need to free cities from its cruel yoke.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Title Page

Summary of

Paved Paradise

A

Summary of Henry Grabar’s book

How Parking Explains the World

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar: How Parking Explains the World

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

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NOTE TO READERS

This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Henry Grabar’s “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” designed to enrich your reading experience.

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The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Jie Zou and Zong Li had an argument over a parking spot in Queens on November afternoon. When they got out of their cars, Zou punched Li in the face and Zong Li swung a baseball bat at them. When the Audi hit Li, Zou flipped across the hood of the car and sent it careening into Rainbow Bakery’s plate-glass window, leaving shoppers lying in the shattered glass. Five people were taken to the hospital and Zou was later arrested and charged with assault. Parking-driven psychosis is a regular feature of American life, and these outbursts are more ordinary than we might like to think.

The most important details in this text are that parking is a fixation, and that we expect parking to be immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most importantly, free. We also expect parking to be perfect, and many communities govern parking by unwritten codes or hierarchies, such as the one at the University of California at Berkeley, where the only way to secure a free, reserved parking space on campus is by winning a Nobel Prize. This highlights the need for unconditional parking satisfaction and the opaque, contested ownership customs that govern curbs, lots, and shared garages. The need for a perfect parking space has shaped the physical landscape of America, from strip malls to office towers to houses. It is illegal to build a home without parking, and parking has become the organizing principle of American architecture.

In some cities, parking has become the single largest use of land, with LA County adding 850 new spots every day for thirty years. Why did we do this? Was parking more important than anything else? The "parking shortage" is a political cudgel to shut down new business and keep out new neighbors. Laws that require every building to include parking prevent us from creating housing, especially affordable housing, and make it impossible to reuse older buildings or work with smaller properties.

Parking is a mutant strain of yeast in the dough of architecture, making designs bigger, uglier, and farther apart. It is also a key element in the way a city interacts with wildlife, heat, and rain. The most important details in this text are that parking is an environmental disaster and that it is the primary determinant of the way a place looks, feels, and functions. There are as many as six parking spaces for every car, meaning that the national parking stock is never more than 17 percent occupied. This is due to the expectation and pursuit of all three parking qualities, which has led to the requirement of many properties to be more than 50% parking by area.

This has made it difficult to do anything else. The "parking problem" is as old as the road itself. In the seventh century BC, Sennacherib posted signs that read "under penalty of death and public impalement". Pompeii and Herculaneum have sections of pavement demarcated by raised stones, which may have been early parking regulations. Julius Caesar introduced off-street chariot parking in Rome, and New York established a towing service to clear the streets of animals.

By the middle of the twentieth century, many experts feared parking was the most important issue facing American cities. Today, the fear of a parking shortage has become a major dilemma. Driving is freedom, the open road, and limitless space to inhale, but parking is its cramped, contested partner, driving's ill-tempered brother. Good driving is courteous, but good parking is cutthroat. The most important details in this text are that parking is a major field of research and interest, yet it is overlooked by governments and institutions that depend on its good order.

This is due to the fact that every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked, and the people who helped make it so are the mall builders, mobsters, police, politicians, garage magnates, and community groups. This is a story of how we destroyed our cities in search of parking, and the people who helped make it so. This book proposes an honest reckoning with the subsidies and externalities of cars, but it is not anticar. It suggests that most people would like to be able to leave the car behind once in a while, to travel on foot, on a bike, with a kid on Rollerblades or a baby in a stroller, on a bus that comes when you need it and goes somewhere you want to be. The promise of fixing the parking problem is not to force the reader out of their car, but to let them forget it now and then for a moment.

In the last two decades, people have begun to seek changes to the relationship between parking and cities. Architects, activists, planners, builders, researchers, and environmentalists have begun to interrogate the country's relationship to parking. They have caught on to the central role that parking plays in determining whether we get more places that look like Greenwich Village or another strip mall.

PART 1

What a Mess We Made

Housing for Cars and Housing for People

In 1991, a generational tale of parking's role in American life began in Solana Beach, California. This story is about how the need for parking holds an insurmountable power over the decisions we make about the places we live. It is difficult to find a consensus view about whether the parking shortage is real, imagined, or addressable, and the need for parking is an evergreen retort, straddling the line between a real right of access and a contrived and disingenuous excuse. Miguel Zamora, a thirty-nine-year-old tenant from Guadalajara, rented a one-room studio there with his wife and four kids. He fixed things himself and paid for it himself.

Ginger Hitzke was an improbable figure in the world of Southern California real estate when she was trying to establish herself as an affordable housing developer in 2008. She had just $14,000 in the bank when she went out on her own, but when a friend sent her a newspaper clipping about the Solana Beach project, she thought it was her model. She scraped together $10 million in financing and Solana Beach gave her a shot, calling the project the Pearl, a reference to the slumlord whose evictions had set the process in motion. Ginger Hitzke was an affordable housing developer in Solana Beach, California, who had no trouble getting the job due to the high fixed costs of building things in California. She had a bright mural by Maxx Moses and a painting depicting Glinda the Good Witch in a gilded frame.