Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Developers had two laws that explained “just about everything in the physical arrangement of Edge City”: An American Will Not Walk More Than Six Hundred Feet Before Getting Into Her Car To Park an Automobile Takes Four Hundred Square Feet Putting those two axioms together with the high cost of building parking structures, Garreau explained why all these Forbidden City buildings were missing from postwar American architecture: they had vanished into what the apartment builder Payton Chung called the Valley of High Parking Requirements. On one edge of the valley were single-family homes, fast-food restaurants, low-slung commercial box stores—all the familiar building types that could be comfortably “parked” at ground level, even if parking took up 60 or 70 percent of the property. On the other edge of the valley were high-density, high-value properties like offices, hotels, malls, and condos that could afford to build structured (or even subterranean) parking garages. Anything in between was impossible to build because it was impossible to park—surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build.