Henry Grabar: How Parking Explains the World

Join CivicCon for a free, public conversation with Henry Grabar, journalist and author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, on how parking has come to dominate the American built environment and what that has cost our cities. Since the rise of the automobile, we have reshaped our neighborhoods in a relentless quest for car storage, devoting enormous amounts of valuable land to empty vehicles.

Henry will explore how parking requirements drive up the cost of housing, influence traffic and transit, shape neighborhood politics and municipal budgets and degrade the quality of public space. Henry will ask a simple but urgent question: is parking really the best use of our finite resources or can rethinking it help us build more affordable, livable and resilient communities?

Henry Grabar is a journalist based in Boston who writes about cities. From 2016 to 2025 he was a staff writer at Slate where he wrote the Metropolis column, with a focus on housing, transportation, and the environment. He was the editor of anthology (Metropolis Books, 2019), and was the author of (Penguin Press, 2023), which was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the New Republic.

This event is free and open to the public.

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