Parking Lots Can be Places!
My town made a place out of a parking lot. In many of the class conversations and the class readings parking lots are portrayed as the ideal representation of abstract space. They meet the qualifications of space as laid out in The Working Landscape by Peter Cannavò. Parking lots are quantifiable and repetitive with neat lines laid out in perfect rows. It is assumed that parking lots have no history and no character of their own. But in my expierience I have seen something different. I think that in class we have sometimes focused too much on the role of the physical features of a place in creating community and meaning. In my town it was the community that made what could have been seen as an empty meaningless space into one of the most recognizable and appreciated places in the whole town. This space consists of three parking lots in a large shopping center. Surrounding the parking lots are a few stores that are townie favorites, a Starbucks, a tex-mex restaurant called Baja, and a Blockbuster. Two of the three of these stores are chain stores but to us they didn’t feel homogenous and placeless. They were the stores where our friends worked and hung out; it was our Starbucks and our Blockbuster. But the parking lots were so much more than the stores that surrounded them. The youth of my neighborhood founded the parking lots and named them “town.”
“Town” is much more then a space. It is the place to be on a Friday or a Saturday night. It is a meeting place where you can be sure to run into many different groups of people that you know. Now that I am in college, “town” has become a place to go if I want to see someone I haven’t seen since high school. People park their cars and stand in multiple circles throughout the parking lot. They roam from circle to circle for the chance to run into someone they know. “Town” is a distinctive place that requires its own social rules, activities, and name. It was the community of high school kids that created it, not of the politicians that created the zoning laws, or of the CEOs who decided to place chain stores in the strip mall surrounding it. It was my community that created a place out of a parking lot.
I feel similarly about places at Hamilton, too. They seem to lose much of their character when empty.
In terms of the discussion here, I'm not sure if these examples would be conducive to interpreting parking lots as places or as spaces. Perhaps this would depend on whether wind and solar farms are interpreted as places or spaces themselves. The uniformity and organization of wind and solar farms might lead one to view them as spaces. But perhaps more iconic or well-known wind and solar farms, such as the future Cape Wind, could be seen as unique places.
Because there aren't many of these parking lots with wind turbines and solar panels, they are unique and stand out. What if all parking lots take on this additional function of energy harnessing? Would they then be thought of again as monotonous spaces? I think this issue touches on the unclear distinction between place and space and would be curious as to what others think!