Shaping Urbanscape by Zoning Code: An Urban Metabolism Perspective
In some of the cities in United States, the footprint of parking lots has occupied more than 1/3 of the land area, which makes it the most outstanding landscape of the built environment. In the case of Dallas Texas, surface parking occupied 8% of the surface, and up to 20% in the downtown area.
It represents the increasing car ownership since 1910s and the American lifestyle. The emission and oil consumption are two parts of the environment impact of automobile, however another aspect has often been ignored, that large portion of the time cars are immobile, namely, they are occupying a lot. From this perspective, the demand for parking makes that a hybrid or even electric car, has the same environmental impact as a muscle car. The carbon emission of building one parking lot and the circulation emits 165,150 grams of CO2, which means before you reach a parking space, you have already driven for more than 800 miles.
As the oil price peaking and reaching the reservoir limit has become urgent, how we deal with these parking facilities will be important in a projected car-less future. Dallas is located in the blackland prairie ecoregion, named after its rich dark soil, which runs roughly 300 miles from the Red River in North Texas to San Antonio in the south. Most of the Blackland Prairie ecosystem being converted to crop production, leaving less than one percent remaining and making the tallgrass the most-endangered large ecosystem in North America.
The idea of the project is to reclaim the pavement surface parking lots into tallgrass prairie. On one hand, it stores CO2 from the atmosphere. And on the other hand, because the native plants are adapted to the local climate, they require less maintenance, which reduces the CO2 emission.
Update June 2022:
Recently I just found out that a built project looks very alike to my project, which is the “The Sky Garden at 70 Rainey” (Award of Excellence, Residential Design, ASLA 2021). Although it did not say anything about carbon footprint, the appearance and location looks very similar: A building has ground floor of stores, several floors of parking space, an elevated public space, and upper floors of residential/commercial in Texas - which proves that my idea works!
