Carbon Hinterlands

What if parking garages were used to park farming rather than cars? Carbon Hinterlands starts from an infrastructure about to become obsolete: when autonomous vehicles enter everyday life, parked cars disappear from the cityscape, and the garages built for them in city centers become superfluous. Prefabricated reinforced concrete gives a garage an enormous load-bearing capacity and a burden of legacy. Removal costs carbon; built inexpensively from prefabricated parts, most parking structures can instead be swiftly dismantled, reshaped, and reassembled. The proposal is to bring the hinterland back into the city: garages as the ground for local vertical farms, a way to return biodiversity, and as parks, abandoned parking decks refurnished ad hoc by urban farmers, gardeners, and animals.

The proportions are the argument. Feeding and grazing the 98 million cattle of the United States takes approximately 1,016.5 million acres, about 42 percent of the country’s land area, and causes 10 percent of its greenhouse gases; car parking consumes 5.5 million acres, 0.15 percent of the land area, roughly the footprint of residential buildings. What happens to carbon-intensive practices and structures in a carbon-negative future is the question the series puts to the images: cows on a deck, grow lights between the columns, a tree through the slabs, a parking structure in Italy repurposed.

The image series What about Cows: The future of parking and other Carbon Hinterlands was exhibited in Solarpunk Futures at P61 in Berlin from September 21 to December 19, 2023.

A companion series, Carbon Provisions, looks at small-scale interventions for urban change. It is framed by Writings from Protopia, a speculative text set in European cities transformed by climate welfare policies, where the Dutch landscape has filled with air filters, water filters, bee refuges, carbon sinks, food oases, and other structures for the environment, urban communities, and individual wellbeing. In that near future, architects who had grappled with diminishing provisions found themselves primed for the emergence of carbon trading: with minor adjustments to their narratives, designs for public space could be recast as carbon sinks. The images take the story to its objects: garden beds on a Dutch canal, garden beds on a city square, stacked beds above a plaza, planted structures on water, and the garden trees built in Italian cities as protests against the urban garden desert, repurposing vacant parking lots as carbon sinks. Both series are pilot studies toward the measured cityscapes of the LCA-GCS dataset: they ask what an image model already believes a carbon-negative city looks like.