What to do?

For starters we ought to take these lots more seriously, architecturally. Many architects and urban planners don’t. Beyond greener designs and the occasional celebrity-architect garage, we need to think more about these lots as public spaces, as part of the infrastructure of our streets and sidewalks, places for various activities that may change and evolve, because not all good architecture is permanent. Hundreds of lots already are taken over by farmers’ markets, street-hockey games, teenage partiers and church services. We need to recognize and encourage diversity. This is the idea behind Parking Day, a global event, around since 2005, that invites anybody and everybody to transform metered lots. Each year participants have adapted hundreds of them in dozens of countries, setting up temporary health clinics and bike-repair shops, having seminars and weddings.

That’s akin to the approach of an architecture and planning firm in Brooklyn called Interboro Partners. Several years ago it entered a competition in Los Angeles focused on dead shopping malls. Entrants picked malls they wanted to revive. Most contestants proposed erecting office parks or retirement homes or apartment buildings. Interboro took a different approach.

It chose the Dutchess County Mall in Fishkill, N.Y. Opened with fanfare in spring 1974 as another consumer paradise and symbol of automotive and suburban progress, it was built on the promising corner of a major highway interchange in the heart of a county poised for growth. But development ended up gravitating elsewhere, and by the early 1990s the mall was half-empty; by 1998 it was officially closed. To drivers passing it on Interstate 84 it looked like every other dead mall, floating in the usual asphalt sea of parking spaces.

But Interboro’s partners saw something else there: life.

Of course suburban and urban lots are not all the same, and it’s glib to say we should just buy fewer cars. Yes, we ought to wean ourselves from automobiles in favor of public transportation. We rely too much on cars because our public transit systems are often so abysmal. But cars aren’t going away anytime soon, certainly not in the suburbs or in cities like Los Angeles, and we can’t just wish away lots in which to park them. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the landscape writer who died in 1996, years ago pleaded that the parking lot be treated like the city common, with its own community values.

But what does this entail? For big cities like New York it is high time to abandon outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space. These rules about minimum parking spaces have driven up the costs of apartments for developers and residents, damaged the environment, diverted money that could have gone to mass transit and created a government-mandated cityscape that’s largely unused. We keep adding to the glut of parking lots. Crain’s recently reported on the largely empty garages at new buildings like Avalon Fort Greene, a 42-story luxury tower near downtown Brooklyn, and 80 DeKalb Avenue, up the block, both well occupied, both of which built hundreds of parking spaces to woo tenants. Garages near Yankee Stadium, built over the objections of Bronx neighbors appalled at losing parkland for yet more parking lots, turn out never to be more than 60 percent full, even on game days. The city has lost public space, the developers have lost a fortune.