Surprisingly a lot. Not all parking lots are created equal and there is much a clever designer can do to ameliorate the impact of a parking lot on the community.
As this post on the Atlantic Cities website makes clear, the city of New York has taken the lead in creating a specific set of requirements designed to make parking lots greener, more visually appealing and pedestrian friendly. These include landscaping the perimeter with mature trees, creating islands of greenery throughout the parking lot, thereby reducing "heat island" effect, adding bicycle parking and numerous other improvements (check out the presentation that summarizes all of the improvements here).
In another interesting article, reprinted below, Tom Vanderbuilt, the author of Traffic, writes in Slate about making parking lots into community spaces and improving their appearance more generally. His thesis is that parking lots are going to be with us for a very long time so instead of bemoaning their continued existence, we need to come up with creative ways to integrate them into the community space. For example, he suggests that on weekends a section of the parking lot be converted into a portable farmers market - an idea that was tried with great success by Arlington, VA at the Columbia Pike Farmers Market.
My hope is that Harris Teeter designers take note of at lease some, if not all, of these suggestions. Surely, perimeter landscaping, smart water filtration, bicycle parking, and islands of greenery are a necessity. Some other, more ambitious ideas, such as adding solar panels on top or using alternative surface materials may belong to the realm of fantasy. In any event, at the very least, the developers should review the EPA's 2008 Parking Lot Resource Guide, which provides a comprehensive overview of best practices. As for our city leaders - they should consider using this report -- as well as NYC regulations -- as a blueprint for parking lot construction in urban areas.
Empty Spaces
Can parking lots be great?
Illustration by Pat Grant.
There is a wonderful moment in The Parking Lot Movie, Megan Eckman’s unmissable 2010 documentary about a lot in Charlottesville, Va.—which does for parking attendants what High Fidelity did for the record shop—when one of the lot’s attendants, highly educated and chronically bemused, recounts how he once had to turn away a hulking SUV. “There was just no room for them. I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, there’s just no room for you to park your car in this lot. Maybe you can find room to park on the street. But I doubt it.’ It’s like you could almost see the truncated syllogism in their head. Like, I bought the car, how could there not be a place to park it? Surely it comes with a parking space.”
It’s not hard to imagine the would-be patron’s bafflement: Parking,
from the moment we drive the car off the lot, seems to be everywhere. No
one ever has—or could, really—put an exact number on the number of
spaces in the United States. One common estimate is eight spaces for
every vehicle, which would yield a number approaching 2 billion spaces;
other estimates set it at 844 million spaces. The cost of these spaces,
measured, as one study notes,
“in the form of adverse health impacts, building damage, and reduced
agricultural production, to name a few,” ranges somewhere between $4
billion and $20 billion per year.
Parking can reflect the health of the state: Witness the collective
anxiety brought on by the aerial photographs of the 245-acre parking lot
at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a dystopian Disneyland
filled with fleets of unwanted cars at the height of the financial
crisis. Or the psychic malaise that open asphalt engenders, like an
early sailor’s dread of the open sea, at a failing mall. (Indeed,
companies like Remote Sensing Metrics
use aerial imagery of retail parking lots “to determine year-over-year
traffic growth, market share, and comps forecasts.”) It can also seem a
topographic plague, and I am not talking here about “Big Yellow Taxi” but cities like Buffalo, where density and urban fabric were sundered by pervasive archipelagoes of surface parking; or suburbs where buildings and site capacities themselves were forced to shrink as surrounding parking grew larger. The depthless scale of parking lots betrays what they could theoretically house.
The parking lot is one of those forms so visible that we no longer
see it (or indeed, what lies beneath: Everything from Hitler’s bunker to
Henry VIII’s “lost chapel” has been covered by parking). Of course,
another reason we do not see it is there is not much to see. The Onion captured
the kind of shabby banality we associate with the parking lot in a
story headlined “Wal-Mart Parking Lot Puts Municipal Parking Lot Out of
Business.” “I'll miss the old lot," the Onion quotes a patron.
“There were some oil stains, but there was character.” This comment
invokes one by Ed Ruscha, who in works like Thirtyfour
was one of the few artists to ever make an artistic claim for parking
lots, at least from above (and at least before a parking lot claimed,
with cosmic irony, his very studio).
“Architects write me about the parking lots, because they’re interested
in seeing parking lot patterns and things like that,” he said. “I’ll
tell you what is more interesting: the oil droppings on the ground.” The
bigger the spot, the more desired the space.
ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking
by Eran Ben-Joseph
The MIT Press
by Eran Ben-Joseph
The MIT Press
In his new book, ReThinking a Lot,
Eran Ben-Joseph, noting that “in the American context, parking lots may
be the most commonly regularly used outdoor space,” wants to know: “Can
parking have beauty and greatness in the less than obvious traits of
aesthetics and form?” Over the years, students have asked Ben-Joseph, a
professor of landscape architecture and planning at MIT, for examples of
notable or “great” parking lots. Writes Ben-Joseph: “I could barely
think of one.”
While parking garages have received plenty of attention, the humble lot has been rather marooned, not only culturally but by the profession. As Ben-Joseph notes, in the 463-page Wiley Graphic Standards,
a common reference book for planners, parking lots loom as a kind of
uncomfortable afterthought, with a scant three paragraphs of guidance.
(“Parking lots should offer direct and easy access for people walking
between their vehicles and the building entrances.”) Roughly speaking,
more attention has gone into determining the proper geometries of the
spaces themselves than to the overall design of the lot and how it
relates to its surroundings; nevertheless, as Joseph quotes the text of a
design competition, “there is almost no other place of the public
environment that people experience more in their daily lives.”
Can parking lots be great? Given that the bar is set so low to begin
with, it doesn’t take much to make them better. Merely adding a small
tree island planter in the middle of the lot (as opposed to the edge,
where most developers choose to place them), notes Ben-Joseph, has been
shown to reduce surface temperatures by as much as 30 degrees. Some of
the better designs (like the tree-columned lot at Dia: Beacon)
do not forget that the parking lot is, in essence, a building’s lobby,
and strive for some sense of occasion. There are some great meta jokes,
like the since-destroyed SITE-designed Ghost Parking Lot
at a shopping mall in Connecticut, featuring 20 junked cars, emerging
tar-pit style from the black pavement. Some sport engineering
improvements which channel storm-water or reduce the “thermal battery”
effects of lots. But perhaps tellingly, the most visually appealing
examples in the book, like cobblestoned “shared space” in Germany, seem
to work because they do not look like parking at all.
But there is a difference between mitigating noxious effects and
creating good places. That’s the big game Ben-Joseph is after: “Designed
with conscious intent, parking lots could actually become significant
public spaces, contributing as much to their communities as great
boulevards, parks, or plazas.” And, in theory, just as any open space
can be converted into a parking lot, however temporarily (as for county
fairs), a parking lot can be converted, however temporarily, into a
public space.
And so parking lots house farmers’ markets on the weekend, or
temporarily carnivals, or even political protests: A number of the
Occupy protests actually occurred in parking lots. (Whether this
represents spontaneous public space or a cordoning by police
is an open question.) On the fringes of Wal-Marts, one even finds
temporary settlements. “We’ve seen people sitting around the asphalt
telling campfire stories,” a Wal-Mart spokesperson says of the
“boondockers” who congregate in lots in their RVs. One conjures Edward
Abbey rolling in his unmarked grave in the Cabeza Prieta desert—and it’s
thankful he was buried so remotely, to avoid the fate of one person
described in the book, whose lone, fenced grave was ultimately
surrounded by parking.
Eran Ben-Joseph
Photograph by Dominick Reuter.
Photograph by Dominick Reuter.
The dilemma with weekend farmers’ markets or Sunday pregame tailgate
parties comes on Monday morning, when that festival atmosphere is now a
windswept void. Ben-Joseph wants to know what can be done to make
stadium parking less glaringly nonfunctional, but the better question
may be why stadiums need massive parking lots to begin with. Attend a
soccer match at, say, London’s Chelsea Stadium, and instead of
tailgating, one finds people walking from local pubs to the stadium, a
boisterous, merry procession. And the next day, those same pubs are
doling out fish and chips to regulars.
As noble as Ben-Joseph’s endeavor is, one wonders if the limitations
of the form are simply too daunting. The real question is: Can parking
lots become great spaces as parking lots? Could they be places
that people are drawn to, want to linger in, rally around, where
children can play? People adapt to parking lots, fashioning public uses
out of them because, primarily, they have to. (I speak from teenaged
experience.) But would anyone—and the ultimate test here would be
someone outside of a car—go to a parking lot by choice? To consider the
Project for Public Spaces list of what does and does not represent
place-making, parking lots fall overwhelmingly into the negative ledger:
“Design-driven,” “exclusionary,” “monolithic development,” “overly
accommodating of the car,” “privatized,” “one-dimensional,” and so on.
“Why can’t parking lots be modest paradises?” Ben-Joseph asks. Why
can’t they be “a pleasant place to visit and coexist with cars”? Well,
for one, they are filled with drivers, who have the unfortunate habit of
striking people in parking lots (when not getting all aggro
over claiming spots). I do know of one such place where it’s pleasant
to visit and coexist with cars. It’s called a car show. They look nice,
and they are never go anywhere.
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