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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
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69/99
Critics' Rating Index
68/99
Readers' Rating Index
90/99
Scholars' Citation Index
92/99
Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spotParking, quite literally, has a death grip on each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems—from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.
Reviews
"Many Americans expect parking to be "convenient, available and free" — in other words, "perfect." Grabar empathizes with these desires, which is partly what makes Paved Paradise so persuasive."
"Grabar makes a powerful statement about cities: For all our idealization of architects and cautionary tales about all-powerful planners like Robert Moses, most things get built with little thought and by nonprofessionals."
"Grabar runs through the deleterious environmental consequences—not only of cars but of paving so much land to store them—but he's more focused on what these policies have meant for urban life."
"An anti-parking polemic, with many bits of mordant social history related in a good-natured and at times puckish vein ..."
"An engrossing examination of parking and the many other issues that intersect with it."
"Grabar offers an intriguing, wide-ranging, readable perspective of the urban American parking scene, its issues, and possible future."
"Grabar follows housing activists' efforts to legalize in-law apartments carved from single-family houses, in many cases from the garage."
"Paved Paradise sensitized me to just how profoundly parking itself has contributed to the uglification of urban life ..."
"The reporting in this book is rich and deep."
"Using vivid examples and illustrations, Grabar sketches the history of parking in the U.S."
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