Parking Issues and Policies (2024)

A Marxist psychospatial analysis of the parking lot as arena of social discourse.

This paper utilizes a combination of participant observation and a purposive sample of artist-residents at Working Artists Ventura (WAV) to explore the political attitudes of those who are simultaneously artists and recipients of subsidized housing benefits—housing intentionally subsidized to create a Community Arts District (CAD). After signs announcing new parking restrictions unfavorable to residents were vandalized, artist-residents of WAV were forced to revisit their relationship to the City of Ventura and the WAV’s developer. The frequently paternalistic relationships between artists and the City and the Developer prompted questions—raised decades ago by Henri Lefebvre—about a “right to the city” and specifically about whether urban space should be defined by use value (more akin to art as artists understand it) or exchange value (more akin to how developers and city officials understand art’s role in urban revitalization). This study thus has implications for CADs nationwide. We conclude that absent a more nuanced understanding of what art is (and its relationship to the ancient polis) CADs run the risk of further segregating, marginalizing, and polarizing neighborhood residents, reinforcing an instrumentalist view of the city and of possible political communities.

University of Oregon Graduate School, 2020

Can one story encapsulate the entire story of Portland history and American culture in one fell swoop? If so, there are few better candidates than that of Harbor Drive, the once-heralded six-lane freeway along the west side of the Willamette that destroyed the better part of the city’s oldest neighborhood before itself being passionately ripped out in the nation’s first intentional freeway removal. Harbor Drive is the poster child for the damage to historic buildings wrought by the automobile in the 20th Century, resulting in the demolition of much of the original city. It is for situations exactly like Harbor Drive that preservation regulations like 106 and 4(f) became necessary. The construction of Harbor Drive resulted in the demolition of 79 mostly cast iron buildings east of Front Street (now Natio Parkway). Its success was fleeting, however, and only 30 years later it too fell to the wrecking ball, a victim of the desire for ever-faster roads that it helped to create. In 1974, Harbor Drive became Waterfront Park. Nationally famous in urban planning circles, the removal of the freeway for a park “was an important step in promoting the urban renaissance that the city has since experienced.” Harbor Drive destroyed much of the first Portland to craft the mid-century Portland, and its own destruction in many ways helped shape today’s Portland.

Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, 2019

“Architecture is not about the conditions of design but about the design of conditions that will dislocate the most traditional and regressive aspects of our society and simultaneously reorganize these elements in the most liberating way, so that our experience becomes the experience of events organized and strategized through architecture.”Bernard Tschumi, Six Concepts Cars are an integral part of American culture and rule the American landscape; therefore, parking garages are a dominant American architectural typology. Due to this fact the Parking Garage Studio was created with the goal of questioning societal norms that limit parking garages to ugly, utilitarian structures. The creation of the assembly line and the mass production of automobiles by Henry Ford forever changed the American landscape and culture by placing the motor vehicle in the forefront of our lives. From the development of the interstate system by President Eisenhower to the American domination of motor vehicle commerce, cars, trucks and SUVs have been seen as much as an American right as freedom of speech. This attachment to our automobiles has led to a need to shelter and protect them as we do our other belongings and even family. Parking garages for our homes have become an extremely important, even dominating, part of residential architecture. So much so that residential parking garages tend to take up over 50% of the front façade of most new homes.As the population in America continues to expand, so does the size of our cities and the space needed for car parking. Due to this alternative transportation is being explored as an option to address this issue, especially in light of the current energy crisis and cost of gasoline. However, this does not guarantee the diminished use of motor vehicles and the single car driver, especially as electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are being developed. Therefore, architects still have a responsibility to design parking garages that challenge the current typology and its relationship to the evolving American culture.Since we see parking garages “as necessities, not amenities” they have become a modern staple in American life both as a convenience and as revenue generator for most cites. This mentality is slowly changing in some areas as amenities are being added to parking garages as a necessity demanded by users who by default become consumers. Nonetheless, the idea that parking garages are essential has typically not led to efforts to create architecture necessary for anything but functionality.Certain negative connotations are associated with parking garages that a change in typology should address and could possibly even solve. The stereotype of dark, dangerous spaces within parking garages has led to various characterizations of these structures as places of violence and crime. Author Deane Simpson analyzes this issue in his article “No Exit: Why Do Bad Things Always Happen in Good Parking Garages?” on the use of parking garages for action films from the 1960s and 1970s. Other various media such as television and literature also perpetuate this idea through the stories they promote of attack and ambush in parking garages.This architecture of the everyday car culture must be challenged if we are to move forward in the design and development of buildings that not only function as part of our everyday lives but also become an integral part of the cultural fabric of our societies.

"In Green Day's “Welcome to Paradise,” the storyteller is heard while recording a message on his mother’s answering machine, reporting back since he’s left home. My mother and I did this via email and phone as well, and like the storyteller in the song, after a few months of report backs, any bit of hesitation and oddity became familiar, even a proud point of reference. In such a short time, the scary and new becomes the mundane and daily. That is one message of the song. The other message is one of gentrification—generations of white kids raised just outside city limits, who when given their first chance, rush back to the very urban centers their parents were so proud to have escaped. For my parents it was Regan-era “white flight,” but for our generation it is something quite different."

Argumentation and Advocacy, 2014

In 2005, an art installation transformed a leased parking space into a temporary park. When the image disseminated online, it sparked a global movement to rethink urban space. The PARK(ing) Day movement enacts a spatial argument at the intersection of localized PARK(ing) installations in particular places and the dissemination of the concept ofPARK(ing) Day in online spaces. We show how residual traces of temporary installations exist in online spaces that shape the broad dissemination and development of this movement and its message, which then influence the construction of PARK(ing) installations. In exploring this play between place and space, endurance and ephemerality, we highlight how the movement constrains and enables the tactical deployment ofPARK(ing) installations as spatial arguments.