What would you do for a great parking spot?
Henry Grabar will explore how the pursuit of the perfect parking space has forced us to sacrifice affordable housing, attractive architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and lively town centers in favor of congestion, sprawl, and waste, weaving the parking fixation into the history of the postwar American city. He will also discuss his reporting on how cities and towns across the country are beginning to challenge this legacy of 20th-century car culture, with surprising results. You’ll never look at a parking space the same way again.
About the Book (from the publisher):
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a shocking number of Americans kill one another over parking spots, and we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Since the advent of the car, we have deformed our cities in a Sisyphean quest for car storage, and as a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted to empty vehicles. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, traffic patterns and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, and the overall quality of public space. Is this really the best use of our finite resources? Is parking really more important than everything else?
In a beguiling and absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Slate staff writer Henry Grabar brilliantly surveys the nation’s parking crisis, revealing how the compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems— from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—and, ultimately, how we can free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
About the Speaker:
Henry Grabar is a staff writer at Slate where he writes the Metropolis column, with a focus on housing, transportation, and the environment. His work has also been published in Architect, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, and he has produced podcasts for Decoder Ring, 99 Percent Invisible, and What Next. He was the editor of The Future of Transportation anthology (Metropolis Books, 2019), and was the author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin Press, 2023), which was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the New Republic.
Presented in Partnership with Princeton Public Library and Walk Bike Princeton
