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Book Review
| Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture. By John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. xiii + 293 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $34.95.
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| "I have trained myself to see what others overlook." Thus Sherlock Holmes (in "A Case of Identity") accounted for his success. In Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle have done the same, yielding the first scholarly monograph on an overlooked but overwhelming force in American social geography. |
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Even in their dormant state, cars have been forceful agents of transformation. In Lots of Parking the authors (a cultural geographer and a historian) discuss immobile autos, especially in cities, where their spatial demands were most disruptive. Curb parking, open lots, and parking garages are treated in turn. Jakle and Sculle could not have chosen a worthier problem for investigation. |
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Yet the authors were surprisingly reluctant to put this intuitive masterstroke to use. They have uncovered a long-lost key, but they have not yet tried it in the lock. Though eager to prove the worth of their topic, Jakle and Sculle disavow any intent to fulfill its promise: "We do not pretend to bring to the topic special insight other than a willingness to synthesize and assess in essay form what previously has been written" (p. 16). Some readers may hesitate to press on. |
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Those who do will find some insights anyway. Better than the text, photographs and maps show the stunning extent of parking's ravaging of cities. Sometimes the authors hint at something that might have been a thesis: parking was the suburbanization of downtowns, for example (p. 93). Yet when the authors do venture an explanation, more often it is the too-handy "love affair" of Americans with the automobile (p. 245), which is treated as self-evident and which, by explaining everything, explains very little. |
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If a love affair is indeed part of the story, so are the rivalries that so often accompany such affairs. Romeo and Juliet's love could not free them from family entanglements. Neither could Americans' devotion to their cars make their cities' conversion to the motor age as cool and bloodless an evolution as Jakle and Sculle describe. |
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The authors' history is strangely devoid of people and their points of view. In Lots of Parking, parking lots and garages begin, grow, and spread—but we do not learn how or why. The decimated cities eloquently described in photographs and maps somehow happened, apparently without conflict or trauma. Yet in city after city, parking fomented bitter fights. Curb space was scarce and people (street railways, merchants, motorists, pushcart vendors) fought for it. Merchants bitterly opposed traffic commissions seeking to ban curbside parking. Auto clubs organized to fight parking meters. Manufacturers promoted visions of a motorized city. Neighborhood residents rallied to stop the bulldozers. Such conflicts vitalize the history of parking, make it worth investigating, and offer opportunities to understand how cities came to be converted to meet the needs of motorists. |
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Readers will also be deterred by much of the book's writing, which too often is needlessly murky. Yet Jakle and Sculle have rendered a service by proposing that parking may be an overlooked window into the troubled history of American cities. Scholars seeking fruitful lines of research should be encouraged that the real work still lies ahead. |
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Peter Norton is a historian of technology and visiting assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. His forthcoming book is tentatively titled Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. |
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