A professor of mine once argued that the septic tank was a sneaky driving force behind the rise of suburbs. Once things like electricity and plumbing became standard, people who wanted these things had to live within a reasonable distance of the pipes, plants, and generators that made it all possible. But as septic technology spread after World War 2, it became possible to still flush your toilet without relying on a municipal sewer line, and thus, mass-produced homes, each with a little excrement-holding tank, were able to sprawl out across the country.
Don’t worry, this isn’t another post about poop (still kind of my favorite post), but septic tanks are a good illustration of a fundamental force shaping our living patterns: Storage. The outskirts of many American cities are pockmarked with self-storage facilities, Amazon fulfillment centers, scrapyards, used-car lots, and other signs of a society with a lot of stuff. In industrialized countries, we often own more than we can keep in our house and produce more waste than we can deal with on-site. Storing the inputs and outputs of urban life is a delicate balance.
Imagine the web of your possessions. They may be concentrated in your house but chances are some of them are spread out across the city — or at the very least spend time outside your domicile on their way to you. Let’s take one of the most common examples - where you can stash your car. In much of America, the car lives in its own little house next to yours called the garage. In a dense city, it’s not feasible for every house to have its own garage, so we build multi-level parking structures or turn over a floor or two of our apartment buildings to car storage. In some cities, like New York City, the public road doubles as storage for privately owned vehicles and you can just put your car on the street for free. We subsidize this “free” on-street storage with our tax dollars. All this sounds incredibly normal until you realize it’s not. I had a car in New York for about two months during the peak of COVID-19. One day I drove around for an hour and a half looking for parking by my girlfriend’s parents’ house. I ended up parking in an entirely different neighborhood on a residential street in Dumbo. This whole operation would be illegal in many parts of the world. In London, if I’m going to store my car on a residential street I need to have a residential parking permit that proves I live in the area and thus have a right to store my car there. In Tokyo, it’s illegal to park your car on the street, period. To even own a car in Tokyo you need proof that you have access to a private or public garage. The point is that norms around where you can put your stuff can drastically shape urban form.
I don’t have a car anymore. I have a bike that lives in my bedroom and sheds dirt onto my floor. I keep it here instead of on the street because I don’t want someone to steal it. When I lived in London I would pass these little sheds in the curb lane called “cycle hangers,” where residents could apply for a designated parking space from their local Council. The hangers lock, and only owners have the keys, protecting the bikes from thieves and nominally from the elements.
My immediate thought was always “they must have had a nightmare taking that parking space away.” But even this is a normative assumption that car storage is the default use of the curb lane and all other uses are a deviation. London isn’t exactly the Netherlands or Scandinavia in terms of its bike-friendliness, but they’ve decided that cycling is enough of a public good that the city should devote a modicum of its curb space to storing bikes vs cars.
Believe it or not, there are planners who think very deeply about what you can and can’t store on the road. Curb management is the technical term for how a city allocates curb space. The nonprofit I interned for, Open Plans, created an excellent report a few years ago outlining the rapid changes in what we put at the curb. In the past decade, pandemic-era outdoor dining ushered restaurant set-ups onto the curb, while the rise of e-commerce has resulted in mountains of packages sprawled out along the curb.
In New York, where until recently it wasn’t uncommon to weave through mountains of trashbags put out onto narrow sidewalks, there has been an effort by activists to take parking spaces away in exchange for curb-lane trash containers that keep sidewalks clear, something that is already the norm in many European cities.
Park(ing) Day started as a stunt in San Fransisco where activists fed a parking meter for an entire day and carted in a bench and tree for people to hang out on.
About 30% of the landmass of San Fransisco is streets and 70-80% of the curb space on these streets is designated as storage for cars. The Park(ing) Day founders wanted to show that these barren patches of asphalt are laced with potential if we’re willing to think differently about what deserves to go there. They also point out a simple but powerful truth - The curb is a public space. What if we treated it as such?
In a similar vein, the artist Michael Rakowitz launched a tongue-in-cheek project called (P)LOT with some very serious-sounding exhibition text
Contrary to the common procedure of using municipal parking spaces as storage surfaces for vehicles, (P)LOT proposes the rental of these parcels of land for alternative purposes. The acquisition of municipal permits and simple payment of parking meters could enable citizens to, for example, establish temporary encampments or use the leased ground for different kinds of activities, such as temporary gardens, outdoor dining, game playing, etc. A first initiative for this re-dedication is realized through the conversion of ordinary car covers to portable tents for use as living units or leisure spaces
Rakowitz created a tent out of a car cover, turning a Vienna parking space into his own little leisure space.
In recent years cities like Seattle, San Fransisco, and Omaha have launched comprehensive curb management strategies. It’s safe to say car parking will remain the dominant use in the near future, but all these plans aspire for curbs to be more flexible and support a wider range of uses than vehicle storage.
When cities evolve, the way we treat storage has to keep pace. If more and more people get around by bike then we logically need more and more places to stash them. When developers purchased a series of condemned warehouses on the Brooklyn waterfront they found many of them were still filled with molasses and mummified coffee beans, a leftover from Brooklyn’s history as a landing point for commodities from the Caribbean. It was once important for the city to be able to store vast quantities of these commodities on-site, but today you can still get a cup of coffee in New York and the warehouses have been turned into apartments, stores, and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Maybe one day the car will go the way of the coffee bean.
Cities need MORE parking for the vehicles that people with disabilities use, since they are often not part of the walking/biking population.
As usual, I learned so much from this post. Thoughts: Decades ago, Portland, Oregon decided that all parking lots had to underground, with a park on top. This could address the needs of those who can't walk or bicycle *and* the trouble of parking spaces hogging curb space. Of course those underground garages would have elevators. Cities and towns need to be both walk/bike friendly, to coax able-bodied peopleout of their cars, at the very least for the sake of the environment *and* must absolutely attend to the needs of those who are dependent on cars for mobility.