Cohabiting with cars: The tangled connections between car parking and housing markets

Car parking occupies as much as 40 per cent of urban land in many cities, yet manages to go ‘expected but unnoticed’. Ben-Joseph (2012, 135) observes how we ‘demand convenient parking everywhere we go, and then learn not to see the vast, unsightly spaces that result’. Although valued for the sense of personal autonomy it offers, private car transport is ultimately dependent on there not being too many other cars around and on adequate car parking space. Given cars are stationary 95 per cent of the time (Vanderbilt 2008), the provision of convenient car storage is essential to car-based mobility (Hagman 2006; Pandhe and March 2012).