distracted by the politics and urban geography of parking

Here's a great little film from the USA about the politics of parking lots. Chatting with my friend David Pinder in NYC earlier this year, we agreed that how the cultural geography of parking (and the way in which accommodating the car in general) affects the spatial dynamics of the city needs some serious analysis and investigation. Increasingly through software sorted geographies' (eg the congestion charge) all of this is creating radically splintered urbanism (one of my favourite books of this decade so far).

"Parking Public is an investigation into the realities of utopian thought as materialized in the mundane and pragmatic spaces of parking lots. Parking lots, one of the most visible, yet overlooked, artifacts of American mobility reveal the concrete space required to store the supposed tools of utopian ideals. Parking Public is a mapping of these literally concrete spaces in an attempt to locate the utopia they serve. Underneath both the empty spaces of parking and the empty promises of utopia are real economies and structures of power."