PERSONAL ESSAY

As designers, when we hear the word ‘non-place,’ we automatically think of places like parking lots, airports, subway stations and so on. However, the spaces that we refer to as non-places are actually completely subjective. There are no universal non-places. What one person views as a non-place, another person may not. They are determined by a person’s unique emotional and physical interaction with particular spaces. It is crucial that we do not simply label places as non-places without fully thinking about and acknowledging that they may not be a non-place to everyone. 

After thinking about how our perception of non-places is completely subjective, I began to think about how this can be applied to parking garages. For one person, a parking garage is simply a place where they park their car every morning after their forty-five-minute commute to work. For someone else, it is where they spend eight hours a day working as a security guard in a small dark security booth. For another person, it is the place where they were sexually assaulted while trying to get into their car late at night. And for someone else, it is the place where their younger brother took his life two years ago.  

For the people who simply park their car and leave, or merely walk past the garage in their daily life, the parking garage is a non-space to them. However, for the security guard, it is the place where they earn their living. The place where they earn enough money to pay their 

electric bill and send their children to school with lunch money every day. For the person who was sexually assaulted trying to get into their car, it is the place where their right to their own body was taken from them; the place that has caused them to lose their sense of security in all aspects of their life. And for the person who has lost a loved one to the parking garage, it is an inescapable reminder of their insurmountable loss.  

These four personas do not even begin to scratch the surface of people’s experiences and perceptions of parking garages and it is crucial to acknowledge this. Although a parking garage would be considered a non-place in most people’s eyes, it is imperative that we do not overlook the people who the garage means so much more to. For it is these people that redesigning the experience of a parking garage will truly affect the most. As a collaborative studio, I am not sure that we have truly given this enough thought. We have been referring to the parking garages as non-places this entire semester, but we have yet to pause and consider that they are not a non-place to everyone. To some, they are everything. If our class were to completely start this semester over, how would this perspective affect the design decisions that we make?