If you haven’t checked out this article from yesterday’s New York Times, do so. It suggests rethinking the parking lot, that source of urban blight which we all claim to hate, and yet, “we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.”

In short, the parking lot isn’t going away, and while we should reverse the policies that have led to the creation of eight parking spaces for every car in the country, we should also start thinking of parking lots as real public spaces. The article outlines a few ideas, from landscaping to utilizing the space for pop-up marketplaces, that support taking lots more seriously rather than merely continuing to ignore them.