Park-above-Parking Downtown: A Spatial-Based Impact Investigation
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Date
2012-12
Authors
Ren, Lanbin
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Parking and parks are both crucial to downtown economic development. Many
studies have shown that downtown parks significantly contribute to increasing
surrounding property values and attract residents, businesses and investment. Meanwhile,
sufficient available parking promotes accessibility to downtown that also contributes to
increasing tax revenue for local government. However, both downtown parks and parking
raise problems. Many downtown parks have become places for drug dealing, shooting
and vandalism since the decline of downtowns in the 1960s. At the same time, residents
and visitors alike oftentimes complain about the lack of parking while in fact parking
spaces occupy a large amount of land in downtown. Parks and parking also compete for
space in downtown where land value is higher than the rest of the city. To address these
issues, several cities have begun to address the relationship between parking and parks by
placing them in one place: park on the ground level and parking underneath. This
typology is defined as a park-above-parking project in this research. However, this
phenomenon has received little scholarly attention. To justify the existing situation of
park-above-parking and to contemplate future projects, this research provides a spatialbased
investigation to discuss the empirical relationships between social cultural and
political-economic impacts, design quality, and related policy-making processes based on four cases. A longitudinal study that traces the direct and indirect impacts of park-aboveparking
projects was conducted for each case through both qualitative and quantitative
methods. This research provides a set of methods for the measurement of contributions of
park-above-parking downtown, connections between park quality, social use and adjacent
economic growth, recommendations for land use planning policy-making and guidelines
for the design of park-above-parking projects.
Description
210 pages