Lots of trouble
Eran Ben-Joseph wants to rethink parking lots. Photo: Dominick Reuter Quick: Name a great parking lot.You probably cannot think of one offhand. If you did, it would certainly surprise Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design at MIT. A few years ago, teaching MIT’s venerable site-planning class, Ben-Joseph found himself confronted with the problem of explaining to students why parking lots are so often nothing but vast fields of asphalt occupying prime urban and suburban real estate. So Ben-Joseph started asking people if they could name parking lots that even had a few good qualities to them. “It started with this quick question: ‘Have you seen a great parking lot lately?’ I surveyed a lot of people I know, students and colleagues, and most people can’t point to one,” Ben-Joseph says. Before long, he had come to one conclusion: “Planners, developers and public officials should pay more attention...