Adaptive Reuse: Healing America's Parking Lots

 

American communal gathering spaces do not need to be built from scratch. We have been in a culture that leans into a perpetual more and perpetual growth model for the better part of a century. We have constructed countless things in this country that does not benefit anyone, and will not stand for many more years. It is not okay to just keep rolling over and constructing things of little to no cultural significance. We must begin to repurpose these sites to become things that will have a far more lengthy lifecycle and hold cultural importance.

Adaptive reuse is a term that has skyrocketed to prominence within the lexicon of designers and planners within the last decade. It has been seen by some professionals as a huge piece in the puzzle of how to reduce the role that the designer/developer plays in the current climate crisis. This ideology essentially stems from the well-known adage within sustainable construction ideologies that “the greenest building is one that has already been built.” Recalling a figure from an old architecture class I took in my undergrad days, the number one carbon-embodied energy industry globally is construction, and almost ninety percent of all debris pollution throughout an entire construction project process is emitted during the demolition phase. Thus, the reduction of that action can have profound effects on sustainable efforts. Elements of the landscape can also be adaptively reused, and landscape architects can play a role in reusing site elements in ways that create sustainable and culturally profound moments in the landscape of the future. One of the main elements of the site that can be imagined as an important adaptive reuse in the landscape is the repurposing of one of America's most prevalent and problematic landforms. The parking lot.

   America has an absurd amount of surface-dedicated parking lots. I would love to know if we could repurpose these lots either to provide communal common ground or to create water management or utility service for a community. We can use principals of adaptive reuse to reclaim these large swathes of land to service more than the American's connection to personalized vehicular transportation.

            The notion of adaptive reuse that immediately comes to mind with adaptive reuse may be, say, a trendy brewery that was retrofitted within the frame of an old metal manufacturing warehouse. This trendy application of adaptive reuse may not be the same as reusing a parking lot. The parking lot is a symbolic byproduct of the American cultural ideology that the “ultimate expression of freedom” is transport by individual personal vehicular measure. However, in the texts noted below,  Haunt proposes the idea of “longue durée," illustrating the idea that within the cultural psyche, opinions of sites and places continuously undulate and change. So how can we apply this to the parking lots that have such a chokehold on the American landscape?

            In the text noted below, “Lots of Excellence”, there are several incredibly interesting means and methods to provide a more useful, enriching, and sustainable environment on these existing paved lots. One approach introduced, and one that makes the most immediate sense, is to repurpose large lot swathes on city corners into massive public plazas and gathering spaces. One example, Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has seen a great reception to the 1997 plaza conversion project. It took what was once an eyesore and created a sense of place for the community to engage with and form an identity around. This sort of adaptive reuse, keeping almost fully paved space on the site where the paved lot existed, may not immediately scream sustainability to the layman. However, I would posit that a well-designed project such as this, even if it did not include one “green” solution to site sustainability, still has the possibility to be an extremely sustainable approach. High-quality material use and long-life cycle planning can be more sustainable than planning the site with pervious pavers and high levels of planting if the former can last four times longer than the latter. This is due to the figure that was mentioned earlier that continual demolition and rebuilding of sites is one of the most carbon emitting and polluting processes in our world today, and as many of these culturally important hubs that can be created reduce this problem and shows people that we do not constantly need new growth and change within the urban fabric. Essentially, longevity and cultural relevance of a project equals more sustainability than any “green capitalism” / faux sustainability design effort. If a site is well designed enough that it will be culturally relevant and beloved enough to never be replaced, it is inherently sustainable, and if it comes from an adaptive reuse effort it is an incredible start and case study to reframing how we, as a culture, look at the sustainable future of the urban fabric. I will quote Hunt’s Haunts in reference to this point. “… a poet, especially a dead one, cannot control how we read and understand his poetry, but that – especially if it is good – we will constantly reread it in new ways, so even when later generations repeat the same words … they will give them new meaning and resonance.”.  This helps to illustrate the point that if something is worthy of longevity, it can be relevant through the annuls of history, and will be studied and loved by more people than the generation it was intended for.

 

 

Porter Square in Cambridge

[large, paved lot to remain, but culturally relevant sense of place created]

            Now let's look at an example that does drastically change and adaptively reuse a parking lot site. I found the lot adaptation for the Sierra Nevada brewery to be a very interesting adaptation in that it let the parking lot remain, but it used new site strategies and intervention to elevate, adapt, and reimagine the arrival experience to a place. The introduction of large industrial frames over a lot accompanied by the introduction of solar panels above and greened planting below creates a pretty incredible and compact ideation of how to use a working parking lot for more than parking. Interventions such as this, in my opinion, do not exactly fit into the definition of adaptive reuse, as the original function is preserved, but I would put this sort of project into its own category, adaptive enrichment. It allows the lot to service several needs at once as opposed to being a large swathe taken just for the purpose of parking the individual’s car. Additional purposes such as this, I believe, should be required of all lots moving forward, as they can transform the parking lot from something that scars our landscape in a parasitic relationship with the landscape into something that has a much more symbiotic relationship with us and the land it sits on.

Sierra Nevada Brewery lot in Chico, California

[shaders, solar power, and entry gathering areas created on lot]

            In closing, I can really sum up my emotions on lots and their future by saying that we need fewer surface lots, more innovation in lots that exist, and culturally enriching ways to adaptively reuse the surface lots that exist when we find ways to phase their need out. To that note, we as a culture need to begin to use the precedents of amazing adaptive reuse projects to spread this approach to development in response to the current model of development that perpetually demolishes and rebuilds poorly designed buildings and landscapes that will be demolished and rebuilt again in 20 years. Adaptive reuse can be a steppingstone to sustainable planning, and it can act as a representation to everyone of the degrowth model, helping to put an end to the current American zeitgeist that craves the unsustainable, perpetual “more”.

 

 

                                                          Works Cited and links to consider

https://www.agritecture.com/blog/2021/9/1/could-this-new-design-be-ikeas-parking-lot-of-the-future

Corner, James “Hunts Haunts: History, Reception, and Criticism on the Design of the High Line” The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner 1990–2010. 2014

Ben-Joseph, Eran, “A Lot on My Mind” and “Lots of Excellence” in Rethinking A Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, 2012.