Parking Garages as Spaces of Opportunity - An Analysis of Overlooked Nodes as Potential Spaces for Adaptive Reuse

Sammanfattning: Parking garages belong to the basic inventory of today’s cities, however their existence and contribution to the urban fabric is marginally discussed under the urban themes of structural transformation, environmental underperformance and socio-cultural fragmentation. This thesis is a study of parking infrastructure in the inner-city of Malmö with a particular focus on rooftops as spaces of opportunities for a sustainable urban development.The thesis aims to investigate whether an integration of parking garages into the urban fabric of their local environment can contribute to a more equal, mixed-use city development through adaptive reuse of the rooftops as public green spaces.Based on a literature review on public space transformation, urban green spaces, its threats and services and an investigation of a specific case study, this thesis identifies parking garages as potential spaces to compensate a lack of urban green and public environment. The study of possible integration of public and green services into the existing structures of parking garages is performed on the level of a city wide analysis, as well as in a particular context of a central district in Malmö. The study shows that the location of parking garages within network nodes of an increasingly mobile society and fragmented city structure could be strategic locations for additional uses. Furthermore an evaluation of parking garage usage has confirmed, that stand-alone, open-roof structures have been affected by vacancy, specifically in the upper floors due to decrease of demand for car parking in the central parts of Malmö. Finally this study concludes that parking garages are overlooked nodes with further potentials for adaptive reuse.