Week 6 Lecture II Flashcards
This chapter focusses on
residential parking spaces and explores how they became a normal, legitimate and planned for aspect of everyday life.
embedding of automobility into everyday life have almost exclusively focussed on
cars in motion.
Analysis has privileged the trips, distances and new living arrangements that automobility affords and the institutions and infrastructures that have made possible the emergence and stabilisation of car-dependent lifestyles
debates of sustainability it is car use which impacts greenhouse gas emissions
cars accounted for more than 50% of the UK transport sector’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2015
this chapter focusses on parked cars rather than cars in use
and explores how planning for stationary vehicles has helped to make automobility what it is today. To do so, it conceives of parking space as an interface of infrastructure and systems of practices,’
the original house plans did not include
any parking spaces at all
Forms of mobility, such as driving
ar all social practices
parking spots
the materials of mobility practices (and, in fact, of all practices) are ‘at rest’ in between performances. These resting objects make demands on space, including requirements of size and scale, location and connectivity (e.g., to the road infrastructure).
In recent decades, car parking space in towns and cities has posed similar challenges.
The main focus for those concerned with these challenges has been the aesthetic and environmental consequences of hard surfaces, including the increased difficulty of dealing with rain water and the reduction of green space in the urban environment
the problem is that parking space
stands empty for much of the time and the solution is to make flexible spaces that might be more often in-use as public space. These forms of analysis and intervention focus on improving parking space itself, but without asking what driving is for or challenging the role of parking space in perpetuating private car dependence.
Driving is a practice, but
we can also conceive of it as an outcome of interlocking practices
Across time, temporal and spatial patterns of practice are reflected
in material form - in the road network. Activities become car-dependent because the spatial geography of practice - where we work, live, exercise, take children to school, shop and so on – takes material form
The chapter focuses on one particular interface: between
the road network and people’s homes. It explores how the provision of space for private cars, as close to the home as possible, became a normal aspect of planning and everyday life
parking space should ‘be provided
as near as possible to the home’ (1961: 45). Though the recommendations in the Parker Morris Report to ‘plan with the motor vehicle and not against it’, because ‘motor cars are a universal ideal’
The 1960s saw a shift away from the emphasis on garages that had been the solution up to that point. Gardens and landscaped areas were conceded for the creation of drive-ins (which we now call drives or driveways) and parking bays (hard standings on the grass verges between the front garden and the road)
parking for ever-increasing numbers of vehicles became
a normal and legitimate aspect of housing and neighbourhood design
It reminds us that parking standards
(and thus assumptions about car use and car dependence) are currently embedded in a range of planning domains – for example within house design and neighbourhood planning. Finally, the study demonstrates that approaches to parking are inseparable from ideas and visions of (auto)mobility and its anticipated future.
Intervening to reduce car use:
There is a different approach on new build developments where the ratios of parking space per home have been lowered. Such maximum (rather than minimum) parking standards have been included in a number of new build developments nationally over the past 5-10 years with the aim that new residents will take up car-free (or reduced car) living.
