Rethinking a Lot

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that
number is increasing every day. So too is Earth's supply of parking spaces. In some
cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It's
official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a
Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking's future.
Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, their design and
function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes
the parking lot into the twenty-first century.

Ben-Joseph shows
that parking lots can be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally
responsible, and used for something other than car storage. He introduces us to some
of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served --
from RV campgrounds to stages for "Shakespeare in the Parking Lot." He
shows us parking lots that are lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully
integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design,
Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as
much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage
they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It's time to change that;
it's time to rethink the lot.