Parking: Introduction

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The New Urbanism differs in several ways from the traditional settlement models from which it springs. No other single factor is as important in forcing variations from traditional practice as the necessity to deal with cars in quantity; and no aspect of that affects the urban fabric as much as parking. Parking must be be handled with both firmness and imagination if the virtues of traditional urbanism are not to be altogether scoured away by it.

The inept provision of parking is the most critical characteristic of the dismal landscape of sprawl, the opposite of traditional urbanism.  Parking lots on the street fronts of stores form the image of the strip highway; cars parked in front yards are what give higher density housing its bad reputation. Such streetscapes are the essence of James Howard Kunstler's National Automobile Slum, because in both cases the parking destroys through intimidation and dessication the pedestrian animation of the street, that sense of life which traditionally is the compensation for loss of landscape and private yard.