Earlier I was working on the post on redemption I have been mentioning, but I need to edit it before it is ready to post. I hope to have it up tomorrow. In the meantime, here is something else to think about.

When I have a few minutes now and then I like to explore places around the world via satellite view with Google Maps and its now radically-improved competitor, Microsoft Live Maps. You can zoom in very close with remarkably clear pictures, and as I was doing so I noticed this in the image to your left the other day in a northern suburb of Helsinki, Finland. Though I am not entirely sure what it is (an actual building, or maybe just a parking garage?) the concept suddenly hit me—parking on the roof. Why don't we see more of this?

After that I pulled up an image of my local Walmart, which you see to your right here. You will notice (if you click on the photo to enlarge it) a nice, flat expansive area of roof with nothing on it but a few air-conditioning units, and then a huge sea of parking in front of the store. Perhaps, though, you also notice that the parking area is not all that much bigger than the building itself. So if all those cars were to park in a lot that was on top of the store (with a small lot beside or behind the store for overflow), Walmart would take up half the space it does now.

I see a few benefits here. First, all that area wasted by the massive parking lot could be turned into greenspace or used for other stores or restaurants. Also, you could conceivably place the Walmart up alongside the sidewalk, thereby making it far more accessible for pedestrians and actually encouraging people to walk there. Think about your Walmart during a holiday season for example. That parking lot is a safety nightmare for pedestrians. I'm not sure if it would have any climatic impact, but if you've walked through something as large as a Walmart parking lot in the heat of summer, you know that it can easily feel 10-15° warmer than the actual temperature.

Now, there are drawbacks too. I don't really know anything about structural engineering, but I think I would be safe to assume that a standard Walmart is not prepared to take the weight of all those cars, so the buildings would need to be designed differently. Also, there is the issue of shopping carts and how people are going to get their goods from the store to their cars. Elevators are one option, although that has severely limited capabilities. You could construct a pedestrian ramp along the backside of the store for the passage of shopping carts; which, with the size of the store, would not need to have a very significant incline. However, I realize that this too presents a safety hazard as people might lose their hold on their cart and send it downhill unmanned, or perhaps some boisterous child decides he wants to use a cart to test Newton's second law of motion.

Again, I don't know how viable of an idea all this actually is. I am just brainstorming. Often I try to think of practical ways we can transform suburbia and try to leverage our existing structures into something more useful and in a way that will work towards rebuilding community (or even just building community in the first place). Naturally, it is absurd to suggest we bulldoze all of our suburban areas and start over, so we need to work with what we have. By consolidating things into smaller spaces, we open the way for new businesses and other such things to make a home in a certain community. Having Walmarts all over the place that eat up huge land areas only serve to isolate communities as they are forced to spread out farther. I just thought that this might be a way to try and rein that in.

What do you think? What kinds of things could we be doing to transform suburbia?