Carlos Moreno is the scientific director of the Entrepreneurship, Territory, Innovation chair at IAE Paris-Sorbonne and author of Copyright. From the “world city” to the “city of the quarter of an hour” (Editions de l’Observatoire, 2020).
When did the first parking lots date back to?
Parking lots appeared with the car. As urban planning objects, they are barely more than a century old. In Paris, before the arrival of cars, horse-drawn carriages parked in the courtyards of houses and buildings. The horses of the three omnibus and tram companies were housed in multi-storey stables. There were still 80,000 horses in Paris at the start of the 20th century.e century. Conversely, the first motor vehicles slept in the street, under the open sky.
Is the mass production of cars at the origin of collective parking lots?
The shift first occurs when the car begins to be perceived as a luxury, an asset to be protected. In town, it first took the place of stables, transformed into garages in building courtyards. And, in fact, with the success across the Atlantic of Henry Ford’s Model T, produced in large series from 1908, cars became more popular and people began to build collective parking lots. In France, one of the oldest dates from 1905. It is the Auguste Perret parking lot [1874-1954]the father of concrete architecture, located rue de Ponthieu, in 8e district of Paris.
Why is public space primarily used as a place for parking?
By the 1950s, cars had become a mass product and motorists were looking for parking. In Paris, the 1954 ordinance authorized the parking of cars in the street at night, and, in 1957, the introduction of blue discs, allowing free parking in blue zones, legitimized the occupation of the roads. Unlike the United States, where residents move massively to the outskirts and do their shopping in shopping centers surrounded by parking lots, European cities, more compact and lacking in land, very often only offer motorists their streets to park.
What types of parking lots have we built?
Little by little, three construction typologies will coexist: on the surface, on the upper floors and in the basement. The car park is the only work that affects all three dimensions of the city. In the 1960s, functionalism in architecture and the massive use of concrete triumphed. It was also at this time that we launched [l’aménagement de] La Défense and the Georges-Pompidou access road [le long de la Seine]. And, in 1964, the first car park with 720 spaces was built under the Place des Invalides, then under the La Défense slab.
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