The Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis is encircled by parking lots: layer upon layer of ramps on the east and west, surface lots on north and south. To help visitors navigate, the lots are sectioned and labeled. I like to park in "Hawaii." When I was a kid, "Giraffe" was my favorite lot at another mall. Mnemonic devices, yes, but there’s something else going on here: distraction. Something to keep our minds off the fact that in a sea of cars, we’re the outsiders.

If you’ve ever felt anxious or frustrated trying to find your car in a vast parking lot, it’s not surprising. In his classic design manifesto, A Pattern Language (Oxford, 1977), Christopher Alexander calculates that when any more than 9 percent of a place is devoted to parking, we feel we don’t belong there anymore. In fact, he claims that any parking area with more than six cars makes it "car-dominated territory," unfit for humans. Too much of the space in our cities—60 percent in Los Angeles—is given over to the car, and most of it is for parking. According to Jane Holtz Kay in Asphalt Nation (Crown, 1997), Houston has 30 parking spaces per resident. One study suggests that during peak traffic hours, about half the people driving through downtown areas are simply looking for a place to park.

The United States has some 200 million of the world’s 520 million cars, and until we create better public transit and bike facilities, we will need to park them. Multilevel parking garages—which average 570 spaces in the United States—are obviously preferable to surface lots, which eat up far more land. But most parking garages are ugly, hulking shells of concrete. How can we improve them? More than 20 years ago, Alexander said we should make them smaller and conceal them. Two designers are currently working on ways to do just that.

Gerhard Haag, a German engineer, wants to change the face of the American parking garage through robotics. Mechanical parking was introduced in Europe and Asia in the late 1940s as a solution to overcrowded cities with limited space. Now, as many as 5,000 automated garages operate on those continents. Soon, Haag’s Ohio-based company, Robotic Parking, Inc., will open the only commercially operated automated parking garage in the United States—in Hoboken, New Jersey.