Wry and revelatory ... Grabar, who writes for Slate, does this now and again: elegantly stating a simple truth that undergirds the complex knot of social questions at the center of his book ... Many Americans expect parking to be “convenient, available and free” — in other words, “perfect.” Grabar empathizes with these desires, which is partly what makes Paved Paradise so persuasive. Only somebody who understands the emotional power of these fantasies can gently show us how bizarre such entitlement actually is.
Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World is not a slog; it’s a romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft, lust, greed, political chicanery and transportation policy gone wrong ... Paved Paradise sensitized me to just how profoundly parking itself has contributed to the uglification of urban life ... Like many books that chronicle the deep problems that afflict humanity, Paved Paradise is better at explaining the magnitude of the crisis than providing workable solutions.
An anti-parking polemic, with many bits of mordant social history related in a good-natured and at times puckish vein ... Entertaining in the specificity of its indignation ... Grabar is earnest in his view that parking is a grave social problem, but his book is of necessity consistently entertaining and often downright funny. Although it is possible to make parking into a serious subject, it is impossible to make it a solemn one ... Grabar has a journalist’s essential gift for making a story out of people, not propositions. He fills his book with engaging eccentrics.
The reporting in this book is rich and deep. It’s undermined slightly by an uncertain structure that an editor should have fixed ... Nonetheless, readers will emerge from this book aware that a series of bad policy reactions to the advent of the automobile helps explain much about today’s landscape.
Compelling and insistent ... Paved Paradise is less about psychology than policy, most of it bad ... Mr. Grabar runs through the deleterious environmental consequences—not only of cars but of paving so much land to store them—but he’s more focused on what these policies have meant for urban life.
Grabar makes a powerful statement about cities: For all our idealization of architects and cautionary tales about all-powerful planners like Robert Moses, most things get built with little thought and by nonprofessionals.
Eye-opening ... Using vivid examples and illustrations, Grabar sketches the history of parking in the U.S. ... This deep dive into an overlooked aspect of the modern world delivers.
