Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael King

There is a quiet radicalism in treating parking as surplus rather than destiny. Michael King, a historian steeped in how cities and nations narrate themselves, frames the built environment as a set of choices, not inevitabilities. The key phrase is "err on the side": it sounds modest, almost bureaucratic, yet it smuggles in a value judgment. When in doubt, he suggests, give land back to life.

The specific intent is practical: if a neighborhood, campus, or civic site has more car storage than it truly needs, reclaim that space for greenery. But the subtext aims at something larger than landscaping. Parking is a proxy for a whole mid-century ideology: convenience as a civic good, asphalt as progress, the car as default citizen. By calling it "a little extra", King punctures the rhetoric that every space must be optimized for vehicles. "Getting rid of it" is blunt on purpose, resisting the polite euphemisms (reconfiguration, rationalization) that often protect car-first infrastructure from scrutiny.

Context matters: King lived through the decades when cities across the Anglosphere widened roads, erased street trees, and substituted public realm with storage lots, then spent the later years watching the costs emerge: heat, runoff, deadened streets, weaker community life. Greenery here isn't decoration; it's a corrective. He implies that beauty, shade, and human-scale space are not luxuries to be added after traffic is satisfied, but civic priorities worthy of taking something away.