ABSTRACT
While the car has prompted some of the most substantial critiques of suburbia, 1 neither the car nor parking is inherently suburban; rather, initial growth in car ownership in the U.S. occurred at a time when the city remained a powerful drawing force. In contrast, most parking requirements, established in municipal zoning codes by largely faulty methods, are decidedly suburban in both their quantities and their underlying cultural assumptions. As a result, the provision of parking has become a strikingly prosaic, cross-typological condition that engages almost all urban and suburban spatial practice in the United States, and is fundamental to the way places are experienced and understood. Flattening is evident in four sub/urban parking systems that reflect increasing degrees of hybridization between suburban requirements and urban formal and spatial constraints. 2
