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Paper short abstract:

Parking is at the core of our current system of automobility, but its history is understudied. This paper concentrates on the history of underground and otherwise “hidden” parking in Helsinki and considers it as a powerful but invisible tool of changing urban environments and mobility systems.

Paper long abstract:

The availability of free or cheap parking is at the core of our current system of automobility (Urry 2004) that governs over space and time. Parking is often provided by several different actors, making it both more complicated to control and more difficult to study than for example the road and street infrastructure. The spatial and environmental history of parking has not been widely studied, although some research exists (see Ben-Joseph 2015; Hagman et al 2007; Hankonen 1994). In this paper, I study the history of “hidden” parking, i.e. parking infrastructure that has been planned or built out of sight as well as its impact on urban environments and its role in naturalizing and cementing the system of automobility.

Using newspaper sources and city governance documents I study the history of hidden parking in Helsinki. In Finland, parking became a main planning question in the 1960s, and large-scale parking solutions were built from the 1970s onwards. The aim was to remove parking from the streets and to place it in or under inner-yards, buildings, and natural formations, increasingly underground. Underground parking is a powerful part of car infrastructure as it is very costly to build and causes permanent environmental impact. Bedrock, yards and even bodies of water became a resource for parking. Parking also intersected with the history of other underground facilities, such as bomb shelters, sewage, and transport. I use Brian Larkin’s (2013) concept of “aesthetic order” to analyze how this seemingly invisible infrastructure has reorganized urban environment.