New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?
These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin, 2023), Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems--from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster--ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.
Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
Timothy Grieve-Carlson, "American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Timothy Barnard, "Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City" (NUS Press, 2024)
Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024)
John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)
Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)
Thomas Hendriks, "Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession" (Duke UP, 2021)
Elsa Devienne, "Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)
Johanna Oksala, "Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology" (Northwestern UP, 2023)
John Soluri, "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (U Texas Press, 2021)
Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, "At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Timothy Morton, "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Adam Berg, "The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Mark Stoll, "Profit: An Environmental History" (Polity Press, 2022)
Manisha Anantharaman, "Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability" (MIT Press, 2024)
Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024)
Elena Kochetkova, "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024)
Data Streams
Heather White, "60 Days to a Greener Life: Ease Eco-Anxiety Through Joyful Daily Action" (Harper Horizon, 2024)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies