Garage Greening: Modular Interventions in Car-Driven Infrastructures
In the average American city’s downtown, more than a fifth of total land is used solely for parking. In the most extreme cases, in places like Arlington, Texas, parking takes up almost half of the city’s area. By contrast, Central Park occupies only six percent of Manhattan’s land area. Despite these staggering numbers, forces both commercial and governmental have been constantly pushing developers to free up space for even more parking. Recently, however, several factors such the death of malls and the shift to online work have left many parking garage floors eerily quiet.
This is, primarily, a design issue. Our current parking systems are wildly inefficient and wasteful. A recent study showed that eight car spaces exist for every car in the United States. This is partially because developers tend to plan parking lots with more spaces than can usually be filled. Mall garages are designed to accommodate visitors at peak commerce times, meaning that much of that space sits empty for the rest of the year. In many new developments, a heavy focus has been put on multipurpose, flexible-use spaces, to minimize vacant urban space. Yet, several elements of parking garages seem to reject reutilization. Most parking garages incorporate elements such as slanted floors and vibration-allowing structural systems more akin to bridges than most buildings. This reduces parking time and cost, but can also lead parking garages to become liminal spaces that no one wants to spend much time in. Attempts to convert these structures into occupiable spaces have been limited by the static, single-purpose nature of parking infrastructure. Furthermore, many developers are reluctant to pursue solutions that fundamentally alter these garages, because many parking spaces represent potential profit during certain times of year. This leaves parking garages as in-between spaces, hollowed-out pockets in the centers of cities across America.
In order to fully understand the scope of this issue, it is important to think about the city not just as a built environment, but as a cybernetic ecosystem. In Anne Whiston Spirn’s 2014 essay, Ecological Urbanism: A Framework for the Design of Resilient Cities, she explores this perspective, stating,
“The urban ecosystem is an open system: energy, material, and information flow through it as resources are imported, transformed, and consumed, then exported as wastes and goods (Brunner 2007). The less efficiently resources are used, the more wastes are produced and contamination increased.”
Wasted space in city centers disrupts this flow. It makes cities less dense, leading to increased energy requirements for transit within them. In order to make urban ecosystems more balanced and sustainable, every resource, including space, must be optimized.
Furthermore, viewing cities as a cybernetic web reveals other elements that act as energy and resource drains. In the US, the average item of food travels somewhere from 1500 to 2500 miles from production to consumption.. This represents a massive waste of fossil fuels, and reveals the broken connection between city-dwellers and their food systems. Resultantly, produce is seen as something that simply appears, disconnected from its origins. In certain urban areas, the complications that arise with transporting fresh food lead to food deserts, where simply buying healthy fruit and vegetables is a challenge. Looking at our food infrastructure, it is clear that something is not working.
What if empty garages could be repurposed to benefit surrounding communities through urban farming? In this paper, I will argue for the necessity of radical agricultural interventions in underutilized urban parking structures. Specifically, I am envisioning a modular system for vertical farming with the goal of transforming garages into flexible spaces that minimize the carbon footprint of agriculture and make fresh vegetables accessible to all.
Before: an empty parking garage floor
After: The space is transformed using modular shelving for urban farming. This is my own sketch render.
Importantly, this plant growth system does not rely on any new technology. It is made up of simple shelving units, able to be easily and rapidly assembled or disassembled. Each unit consists of several layers of stacked soil beds, illuminated by growth lights. The US standard parking space is 18’ by 8’6”. Leaving space for maintenance and circulation, this would allow for a total plant bed size of over 500 square feet, split across four levels. Within one parking space, around a hundred heads of lettuce could be produced every month.
This system could benefit cities in multiple ways. Firstly, by eliminating the fossil fuel cost of transporting vegetables into urban cores, this could greatly reduce emissions. Transporting fruits and vegetables nearly doubles the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from their production, leading to over a billion tons of carbon dioxide produced per year. Though there is significant energy use associated with illuminating vertical gardens, these can be powered through renewable sources, while the food transportation system is currently reliant on non-renewable forms of power. Also, advancements in efficient LED lights have made it more efficient than ever before to power indoor plant growth systems. The reduction in transportation costs and energy consumption would be felt most strongly in city centers, where it is often difficult to move fresh food in with regularity.
Furthermore, by employing modular plant growth systems, the food production of a city becomes itself a cybernetic element. Because the units can be rapidly installed or moved, they can respond quickly to people’s needs. If data suggests that certain floors of a parking garage sit empty during summer months, food production units could occupy those floors for that growth cycle. By selling much of the produce on site, not only are transportation costs reduced, but data on consumer preference can be used to instantly inform the use of planting space. By responding rapidly to the desires and needs of the public, the urban farming system brings food production infrastructure back to the human scale.
While reutilizing parking garages for urban farming has potential, there are several factors that could limit its widespread application. For one, parking infrastructure is generally open-air and not connected to heating systems, meaning that growing plants during cold months would require further accommodations and energy use that might reduce the advantages of urban gardening. Also, transforming an entire parking lot into a permanent urban farm is considered a risky investment. However, I believe that these limiting factors can be mitigated by the introduction of modular, parking spot sized and easily transportable elements, which mean that urban farming can be introduced at a smaller scale and later expanded.
This also allows for this technology to be easily commercialized. While our current systems of economic incentives are undoubtedly destructive for the public and the planet, they are also slow to shift. In light of the urgency of this urban intervention, it seems most feasible to use the structure of a company to fund the installation of these planting units, while collecting profit from the sale of vegetables onsite. While the basic capitalist economic structure of farming is not significantly changed, this system of urban greening reconnects the products of agriculture with its labor and processes. Rather than attempting to completely overhaul current systems, this intervention aims to work within their flawed framework, affecting change from the inside out.
Ultimately, in current circumstances, radical ideas are necessary when envisioning the future of cities. In order to perpetuate our urban ecosystems, it is going to be essential to minimize waste in all forms. By optimizing energy and space usage through cybernetic systems and urban greening, we can move towards a new mode of urbanism that truly responds to the public’s needs and desires.
Sources:
Hess, Daniel, and Jeffrey Rehler. “America Has Eight Parking Spaces for Every Car.” Fast Company, June 15, 2021.
Jacobs, Frank. “These Maps Provide Graphic Evidence of How Parking Lots ‘Eat’ U.S. Cities.” Big Think, March 25, 2023. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/parking-lots-eat-american-cities/.
Central Park | organizations | NYC-arts. https://www.nyc-arts.org/organizations/central-park/.
Kidd, David. “Neglected Parking Garages Are Being given New Purpose.” GovTech, April 23, 2021.
https://www.govtech.com/fs/infrastructure/neglected-parking-garages-are-being-given-new-purpose.html.
Spirn, Anne. “Ecological Urbanism: A Framework for the Design of Resilient Cities”. 2014
Illes, Richard. “Public Transport in Developing Countries”. 2005
Glettner, Courtney. “Energy use in the transport of food: Comparing local and conventional food systems in Berkeley, CA”. May 2008.
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