Extreme Makeover: Reinventing the Parking Lot
It took seven eyars to clean up the parking lot (outlined above in red). Landslides Aerial Photography
The 175-space parking lot at Massachusetts' Wellesley College Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.
Drivers often joke that New York's Long Island Expressway is one big parking lot. But there's a serious assessment under way of how to make better use of the 4,341 acres (1,757 hectares) of parking lots located within half a mile (800 m) of downtowns or transit stops on the island. Imagine what you would do with part or all of that land — and then imagine winning a $10,000 grand prize for your pie-in-the-sky ideas. The Long Island Index, a nonprofit research group, is looking for design proposals — they don't have to be tied to a particular location, although Web users can access a nifty interactive map — for its Build a Better Burb contest, which plays up the notion that asphalt could be suburbia's greatest asset.
“Parking lots are probably the largest underutilized depository of real estate in the country,” says Galina Tachieva, an urban planner based in Miami and the author of the forthcoming Sprawl Repair Manual. With the contest's June 21 deadline fast approaching, armchair developers — and professional ones too — can look for inspiration to projects around the country that have repurposed parking lots for the greater good, with so-called infill development helping revitalize the long-suffering malls and Main Streets of America. (See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.)
via Extreme Makeover: Reinventing the Parking Lot – TIME.
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