Parking Fight! The Stuart Meck Memorial Lecture in Land Use Law and Affordable Housing

Presented by Henry Grabar, Journalist and Loeb Fellow, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

In the 2023 Stuart Meck Memorial Lecture in Land Use Law and Affordable Housing, journalist Henry Grabar argues that the pursuit of a perfect parking space is the prime mover of local politics, contemporary architecture, and urban design. He presents his historical research on the “parking problem,” reporting on parking’s role in community decision-making, and explains the environmental disaster that is American parking policy. Finally, he reviews the movement for parking reform, from the pioneering work of Donald Shoup to contemporary policy changes and their results, as activists try to repair the harms of a century- long experiment in planning for parking.

Henry Grabar is a journalist who writes about cities. He’s a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a staff writer at Slate. His work has also appeared in 99 Percent Invisible, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He has discussed these subjects on television and radio, and before audiences at New America, the National Press Foundation, and various conferences and classrooms. His most recent book is Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, which was published in May, 2023 by Penguin Press.

RSVP at https://go.rutgers.edu/parkingfight