Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“Wry and revelatory.”

An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot

Parking, rather literally, has a death grip on The us: 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, at the same time as such a lot of 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 in reality be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking