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Paved Paradise
- How Parking Explains the World
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
Shortlisted for the Zócalo Book Prize
Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New Republic
“Consistently entertaining and often downright funny.”—The New Yorker
“Wry and revelatory.”—The New York Times
"A romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft, lust, greed, political chicanery and transportation policy gone wrong . . . highly entertaining."—The Los Angeles Times
An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a shocking number of Americans kill one another over parking spots, and we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Since the advent of the car, we have deformed our cities in a Sisyphean quest for car storage, and as a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted to empty vehicles. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, traffic patterns and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, and the overall quality of public space. Is this really the best use of our finite resources? Is parking really more important than everything else?
In a beguiling and absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Slate staff writer Henry Grabar brilliantly surveys the nation’s parking crisis, revealing how the compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems— from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—and, ultimately, how we can free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
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Critic reviews
“You might expect a book about parking to be a snore. But I have news to report. 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 . . . [Grabar] lays out the issue cleanly and clearly . . . His highly entertaining take on a serious subject will persuade more people to at least take a good look.” —The Los Angeles Times
“[A] wry and revelatory new book about parking (a combination of words I never thought I would write) . . . The dream of the open road assumes a place to put our cars when we arrive at our destination. This is perhaps why so 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.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
“Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World covers a topic most people overlook . . . The author himself makes the bold claim that 'parking is the primary determinant of the way the place you live looks, feels, and functions.' By the end of this compelling and insistent book, you might actually believe it.” —The Wall Street Journal
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Las Vegas is gambling's mecca - Sin City the Entertainment Capital of the World with 40 million visitors a year. But that's just part of the story. This carefully documented history tracks the rise of Las Vegas from its vital role in World War II, of the Rat Pack era of the 50s, the explosive growth of the 90s, and it's colossal collapse in the post 2008 real-estate crash. It offers a history of the iconic Strip, but also profiles the neighborhoods where over 2 million people live.
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Good History of Vegas - old, modern and mundane
- By Amazon Customer on 06-13-14
By: Geoff Schumacher
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Happy City
- Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
- By: Charles Montgomery
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling improvements on the car dependence of sprawl?
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Great book-terrible narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-19
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Green Metropolis
- What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability
- By: David Owen
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York City.
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A stupid and dangerously short sighted view
- By Gare&Sophia on 11-13-12
By: David Owen
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The Big Roads
- The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
- By: Earl Swift
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From author Earl Swift comes the surprising history of the U.S. interstate system, a fascinating route through the dreams, discoveries, and protests that shaped these mighty roads.
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Lessons from The Big Roads
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Earl Swift
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- 50th Anniversary Edition
- By: Jane Jacobs, Jason Epstein - introduction
- Narrated by: Donna Rawlins
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."
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Fantastic text, dull on audio
- By Meghan on 02-13-15
By: Jane Jacobs, and others
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New York, New York, New York
- Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
- By: Thomas Dyja
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy, Thomas Dyja - introduction
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place - kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been.
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OMG...right on 👍👍👍👍👍
- By howie wine on 04-04-21
By: Thomas Dyja
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Overground Railroad
- The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
- By: Candacy Taylor
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists.
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Narrator destroyed this for me! read it instead
- By purpleprose on 10-16-22
By: Candacy Taylor
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Divided Highways
- Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
- By: Tom Lewis
- Narrated by: Jim D. Johnston
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis offers an encompassing account of highway development in the United States. In the early twentieth century Congress created the Bureau of Public Roads to improve roads and the lives of rural Americans. The Bureau was the forerunner of the Interstate Highway System of 1956, which promoted a technocratic approach to modern road building sometimes at the expense of individual lives, regional characteristics, and the landscape.
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Lots of interesting facts. Poor narration
- By Richard on 06-01-21
By: Tom Lewis
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Crabgrass Frontier
- The Suburbanization of the United States
- By: Kenneth T. Jackson
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day.
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There is so much to think about here.
- By Richard McKown on 06-25-23
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Boom, Bust, Exodus
- The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities
- By: Chad Broughton
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.
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A Story I thought I Knew
- By Meek84 on 07-08-18
By: Chad Broughton
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The Unwinding
- An Inner History of the New America
- By: George Packer
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.
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Can't understand the low ratings!
- By Janet Pittman Henley on 05-27-13
By: George Packer
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The 99% Invisible City
- A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
- By: Kurt Kohlstedt, Roman Mars
- Narrated by: Roman Mars
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.
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The 99% Invisible City
- By Louise Schraa on 01-09-21
By: Kurt Kohlstedt, and others
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The Shanghai Free Taxi
- Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China
- By: Frank Langfitt
- Narrated by: Frank Langfitt
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this adventurous, original book, NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt describes how he created a free taxi service - offering rides in exchange for illuminating conversation - to go beyond the headlines and get to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks like "Beer", a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life.
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Too political
- By dah551 on 06-26-19
By: Frank Langfitt
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Vanishing New York
- How a Great City Lost Its Soul
- By: Jeremiah Moss
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 15 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
New York City has long been a destination for rebels and rule breakers, artists, writers, and other hopefuls longing to be part of its rich cultural exchange and unique social fabric. But today, modern gentrification is transforming the city from an exceptional, iconoclastic metropolis into a suburbanized luxury zone. Blogger and cultural commentator Jeremiah Moss leads us on a colorful guided tour of the most changed parts of town lovingly eulogizing iconic institutions as they're replaced with soulless upscale boutiques, luxury condo towers, and suburban chains.
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A compelling story, but the narration???
- By S. McGee on 11-30-17
By: Jeremiah Moss
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Interesting topic and thoughtful insight, subpar recording.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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Fantastic text, dull on audio
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Escaping the Housing Trap
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Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-have resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America-and that means everyone. Listeners will find discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment; explorations of housing as shelter, including discussions of zoning policy and NIMBYism; and a comprehensive overview of the Strong Towns approach to solving the American housing crisis.
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A timely book about being a part of local change for the better
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City Limits
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An eye-opening investigation into how our ever-expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communities—and a call for a more just, sustainable path forward.
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Rich, deeply researched data engagingly presented
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The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that reform is in the air, with states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether.
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Interesting topic and thoughtful insight, subpar recording.
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Fantastic text, dull on audio
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A timely book about being a part of local change for the better
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In this no-holds-barred treatise, Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people. But it doesn't have to be this way.
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In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country.
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Walkable City Rules
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Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable - for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment - yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his best-selling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now.
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Crossings
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Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the US alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill.
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Great book, but narration doesn’t fit.
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Palaces for the People
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In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. These are places where people gather, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. Klinenberg calls this the “social infrastructure”: When it is strong, neighborhoods flourish; when it is neglected, as it has been in recent years, families and individuals must fend for themselves.
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Okayyy
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Over the last two decades, there has been an inescapable rise of anger and aggression across our planet. Hate speech has become increasingly prevalent online, Western governments are turning towards authoritarianism and populism, and extremist groups are rising across both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. Every day, it seems, we're hearing more angry voices and fearful opinions, we're seeing more threats and frightening news, and we're reacting faster and less rationally.
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EXCEPTIONAL
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Happy City
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After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling improvements on the car dependence of sprawl?
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Great book-terrible narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-19
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The Big Con
- How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies
- By: Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington
- Narrated by: Amy Finegan
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown. Mazzucato and Collington argue for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.
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Cohesive argument with actionable insights.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-28-24
By: Mariana Mazzucato, and others
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Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
- Transportation for a Strong Town
- By: Charles L. Marohn Jr.
- Narrated by: Christopher Douyard
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns Charles L. Marohn, Jr., delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America's transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities.
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Well Worth Your Time To Read or Listen To!
- By Cliff on 02-08-22
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The Geography of Nowhere
- The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
- By: James Howard Kunstler
- Narrated by: Al Kessel
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good.
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Suburbia Jeremiad with poor narration
- By Skyler Chaney on 10-28-20
What listeners say about Paved Paradise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Hannah Stanton
- 06-12-24
Fascinating, thoughtful analysis
Forever transformed how I view our cities and transportation and even the role autonomous vehicles will play in our post Covid transportation policies. A must read for anyone interested in the built environment.
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- Jacob Hunt
- 04-10-24
Cracked my mind wide open
Vital information and perspective shifting for anyone who values affordable housing and walkable cities. Tons of enlightening data and statistics but never dry or dull. Engaging anecdotes to really drive home (npi) the author’s thesis.
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- Deirdre Donovan
- 04-29-24
Places to live or places to park?
This is a brilliant analysis of how 20th century culture traded off affordable housing in exchange for free parking, and how 21st century urban planners and technology are slowly, but surely changing the landscape. 
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- Harris J. Schneider
- 05-23-23
Inspiring in its unique perspective on the problem of parking.
What an amazing book. I learned more about parking than I ever thought possible. And yet it was entertaining, meaningful and inspiring. It makes me want to go lobby our village our state and our country to start making changes for the better. America doesn’t have to be suburban squalor forever. It just needs to rethink parking.
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- Mortimer Jones
- 07-07-24
Parking is important. And here's why...
I would have never thought that I would be reading a book about parking, but here I am. This book changed my mind and my entire philosophy of urban planning by its sound argument on the concerns and limitation of parking. Must read.
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- eric
- 08-16-24
Thought provoking
Makes you look at cities in a whole new way, highly recommended for anyone looking to learn more about how we got to where we are today in U.S. urban areas.
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- Scott Frazer
- 06-06-23
An eye opening look at one of the most overlooked things
Since moving to a city 15 years ago parking has been a huge part of my life without me really even knowing about it. This book clearly explains just how fundamental parking is. It’s a must read for anybody living in a city
I wish the author talked more about the devastating effects that parking has on biking. He only touched on it a few times.
You can probably skip all of Part 2, in my opinion, and it’s still well worth reading this book
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- nancy taggart davis
- 08-02-23
Fascinating
This was a very interesting and entertaining book. It made a lot of sense to me, and did not surprise me.
There was so much information, that I probably will read it again.
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- startagl
- 10-20-24
amazing history of things often overlooked
who knew something is innocuous as parking cause such havoc for city planners cities and City Life. the story is told and narrated incredibly to keep the interest of the reader/listener. I enjoy learning about things that you drive by daily and don't think about like Bridges and waterways waste disposal electrical grids etc. this book does not disappoint if you are among similar thinking. highly suggested
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- Ryan
- 08-27-23
Imagine a radically different world
This book does an excellent job of breaking down the many different rules about parking and obstacles city planners face when trying to make cities for the people and not for the cars. Europe does this surprisingly well, will America radically change its approach to cities and give them back to the people? Grabar makes the argument that it’s possible but that the intervening years between the current reality and the imagined reality will be challenging
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