Reimagine the future of mobility & parking space
This project began with a question sparked by the rise of autonomous vehicles: what if all the vehicles become autonomous in the future, how is the city gonna look like? I imagined a future where the concept of parking becomes obsolete, where cities breathe and move — no longer bound by static infrastructures but animated by a fluid, ever-shifting web of self-organizing mobility. The project explores the future of mobility, parking space, and the new urbanism.
When you want to give something presence, you have to follow the rules of history and nature, and that is where design comes in. I began by documenting the emotional texture of parking through a personal "parking mood journal," while researching the typologies that shape our current urban patterns — angle parking, parallel parking, perpendicular, and back-in. After wrapping up the research, I started designing and sketching out the potential parking structure.
As I ventured further into urban ideation, a variety of terms came to my mind: suburban downtowns, food trucks, mobility hubs, shared modular housings, technoburbs, red velvet cake cities, green spaces, and charging stations. Like working with a total urban system consisting of modular elements, these would be grouped together in this larger pattern until a rhythmic hierarchy of coordinated metrical patterns was interconnected in the service of the whole composition. So I started with the existing parking lot first, then moved through a design progression: base, mass, tweak, sculpt, and form. Every brick becomes a part of my form of the grid, I explored multiple iterations of different forms, testing how to create this adaptable, modular, and communicable system by creating order and disorder. This evolving structure is grounded in my primary research on parking typologies, but reimagined as a living framework for future urban choreography.
Inspired by American developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, who described human intelligence in the grid-based terminology of “frames” of mind, I began to think of each grid or modular element as a way of organizing the experience of a particular human sense. I’m hoping to bring humanity back into the vision of new urbanism.
As I’ve been reading The Grid Book by Hannah B. Higgins, it mentions the Egyptian New Kingdom city of el-Amarna (1353 BCE), described as an early example of urban modularity — where housing units and linear street grids were deliberately designed to enforce administrative order and class-based behavior. A clear forbear of modernist public housing, likewise reflects the bureaucratization of poverty. Yet, it also enabled the emergence of diverse residential constellations — villages, neighborhoods, and storehouses — woven together in a greater civic structure. In my project, I hope to revive that sense of civilization — to bring the dynamic, human side of new urbanism to life.
Every form of the structure embodies aspirations like social grouping, reaching, stretching, expanding, securing, and breaking - and this is exactly like an elemental portrait of a human being.
To the ones who carried me through — family, friends, and teachers.
