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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
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About Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World
Product Description An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: 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, even as so many 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 really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else? These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems—from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke. Review “Paved Paradise, by Slate columnist Henry Grabar, investigates a topic that’s somehow simultaneously mundane and radicalizing: our extremely American, almost existential search for a parking spot . . . seeing the country through a ‘parking rules everything around me’ lens is an eye-opening education.” —Curbed “Grabar presents the overarching story of how the unquenchable infrastructure required by parking has determined nearly every aspect of urban planning . . . All library shelves will benefit from having this definitive account of an everyday drudgery that deeply affects drivers and nondrivers alike.” —Booklist (starred review) “A deep dive into how the complex rules of parking are affecting us all and what we can do about it . . . [Grabar] proves to be an adept guide to this knotty topic . . . An engrossing examination of parking and the many other issues that intersect with it.” —Kirkus (starred review) "Using vivid examples and illustrations . . . Grabar builds a powerful case that making parking a little more scarce will make Americans’ lives a lot better. This deep dive into an overlooked aspect of the modern world delivers.” —Publisher's Weekly "Grabar offers an intriguing, wide-ranging, readable perspective of the urban American parking scene, its issues, and possible future.” —Library Journal “No one thinks about parking until they can’t find a spot. But the implications of finding room for cars at rest is massive, and Henry Grabar has gifted us with a stunningly eye-opening, wildly engaging survey of a chronically—and wrongly—overlooked phenomenon.” —Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do “Parking—the key to the American landscape, hiding in plain sight. But do you want to read a book about it? Yes, if it's Henry Grabar's lively, entertaining tour of how parking contorts our cities and suburbs into unlivable (or at least unhappy) spaces, and how we can remake them.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and E
