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Why is housing in urban areas so expensive? Why has American architecture become so homogenous? Why are walkable neighborhoods so few and far between, and yet simultaneously, so highly desired? In Paved Paradise, Henry Grabar argues the answer to these questions is rather straightforward: parking and its legal requirements. Indeed, this book presents car parking—its initial development, mid-century embedding into law, and the blind acceptance of it in the decades that followed—as a totalizing force for what plagues American cities. To make such a case, Grabar synthesizes the last several decades of parking research (including deserved focus on Donald Shoup's pioneering work; Shoup, 2005) and introduces readers to individuals whose dreams are delayed (or denied) because of onerous, expensive, and unnecessary parking regulations. It should be noted, though the book's title promises a …