Aerial shot of MetLife Stadium, courtesy of the Fox Sports Broadcast during the Finals of the World Cup
It is almost never a pleasant experience to see a throwaway post go viral. But it happens, and the best you can do is figure out what to learn from it, if there’s anything to learn at all.
In this case, before the match between Argentina and Spain kicked off to determine who would win the World Cup, Fox decided to air a shot from above of MetLife (Sorry, I mean New York-New Jersey) Stadium. And I thought it looked bleak.
Some 100,000 people on Twitter and another 10,000 people on Bluesky must have thought the same.
As one might imagine, when a post enters orbit, the kinds of reactions it engenders are diverse and unpredictable.
A (not well-articulated) commentary on stadium and urban design brought in defenders of the stadium as a whole, the transit situation for MetLife, the state of New Jersey, the destination of New York as a travel city, the freedom of movement that cars provide, the environmental redevelopment of the Meadowlands and countless other elements that were either loosely connected to the idea behind the post or completely severed from it entirely.
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There were, of course, racist responses too. Some of the variety directed at me and some of the variety depicted at an imagined vision of what it’s like to be in a city.
It sparked a debate in my mentions and in the quote tweets about city design. And because of that, I wanted to learn more.
Wide Left spoke to a writer specializing in urban design, Alicia Sands Pederson of Courtyard Urbanist, who emphasized the value of stadium design that produces genuine neighborhoods.
In her words, “A genuine stadium neighborhood would have a public and connected street grid, relatively small development parcels, frequent entrances, independent buildings, multiple developers and owners, ordinary neighborhood businesses, and housing that does not depend on the stadium for its identity.”
The debate the tweet generated (I need to stress that this was a really unfortunate sentence to structure) ranged across arguments relevant to urban design to ones completely far afield of the original point.
For example, there were people claiming that officials banned parking near the stadium. Certainly, they attempted to limit parking so that at least 40,000 fans would arrive via public transit (not just rail, but also through supplemental buses) and prevented parking in the closest lots, but parking was still available in the mall next to the stadium campus, and NJ Transit couldn’t get close to that 40,000 number, only managing a maximum of around 25,000.
But that, like many of the arguments I encountered, was beside the point.
This stadium, to me, represents terrible land use. The fact that the vast field of concrete wasn’t even used in this instance is not a defense of the design, but a critique of it.
I’m also not really interested in whether or not New Jersey is a well-forested state (it is, despite being the densest state by population in the United States), and that fact is not really relevant to whether or not the stadium in East Rutherford exhibits good urban design. Nor do I care about halftime staging.
The urban design failures are not redeemed by the fact that the Meadowlands was previously an environmental disaster zone that was the site of a Superfund cleanup. “Better than before” is not “good.”
We can strive for good urban design
Wait, What’s Urban Design?
What does any of that mean?
Urban design and civic planning have been vital but often invisible architects of a city’s culture and our civic life. The question of what our spaces look like and how they function is at the core of our relationship to the city.
Many people can intuitively grasp the principles of urban design, even if they haven’t heard of the concept before or have explored the topic deeply. Generally, people understand when a neighborhood “feels good” and how nice it is to live in an area where one can walk to places like local stores, coffee shops and even grocery stores.
Competing with this, of course, is the need to make sure people have the means to access the things they need that aren’t in their immediate vicinity — whether it’s food, medical care or entertainment. So, transportation into and out of neighborhoods and metro areas is a critical consideration, too.
There are other competing factors, too, and to resolve all of that, we should figure out what we mean when we say, “urban design.”
“In this model, buildings meet the street to form a continuous public edge, while interior courtyards organize shared green space at the heart of each block. These spaces support daily life — children at play, neighbors in conversation, families at home — while ground floors accommodate shops and services and upper floors provide a wide range of housing, including units suitable for families.”
Broadly speaking, it is the practice of designing cities and neighborhoods around improving human experience — how people live, interact and move through those spaces.
The goal of urban designers is to then move us towards those ideals, and there are a number of principles urban design advocates and practitioners — no matter how much they disagree on implementation — generally follow.
For example, people and goods need efficient transport to a wide variety of locations, and those locations might have different needs depending on the particulars of what they provide.
A sporting venue will need larger public space, more transport options and a variety of transport options to move people, equipment and food into and out of the arena in compressed periods of time, unlike a convenience store — which has low, consistent traffic and an easy-to-load profile of consumer goods.
These spaces need to be coherent, which is to say people should have a good idea of where they’re going and how to get there. There should be the ability to meet a diverse array of needs, whether that’s by transporting people to the areas of the city that can meet those needs or by concentrating a number of services in one easy-to-access location.
The radical evolution of stadium, ballpark, and arena architecture has occurred over a relatively brief period. The birth of modern-day sports facilities is largely attributed to the design of Arrowhead Stadium and Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, in the early 1970s. Both were among the earliest examples of single-purpose venues with modern amenities.
However, those stadiums are surrounded by a sea of parking, just off I-70, and are nearly 15 minutes from the heart of downtown. Like many other sports venues that came in later years, they lack thoughtful pedestrian scale or community connection. They function much like isolated spaceships—massive structures in the middle of a city, daunting in size and scale, with many missed opportunities to be valuable neighbors.
Safety is an important goal, too. For some, that might mean surveillance or policing, while for others it could mean open sightlines and slower traffic. A well-lit walking mall with bollards preventing cars from entering the walking area is safer than a dark commercial area with no sidewalks and a wide, eight-lane road routing traffic at 60 miles per hour that separates the businesses from each other.
There are other priorities too: making sure residents and visitors feel comfortable, establishing a sense of identity and designing places sustainably, with environmental impact in mind. Making sure the spaces can be responsive to future changes in technology, trends or attitudes is also important.
Why Was the Parking Lot Bad?
So, why was I upset to see a giant parking lot?
It turns out that having an enormous, flat parking lot is one of the worst design decisions one can make for any public space. There are a dozen ways or more to transport people from one place to another, and it’s not necessarily the case that we should immediately prioritize one at the expense of another.
It is intuitive for most people in the United States and Canada that when we think of a space that needs to host a large number of people, we need to figure out where those people will need to park their cars.
This is a mindset, cultivated for over 70 years, that cars are the best or only way to get people from one place to another.
The reason this developed in a unique fashion in North America has to do, of course, with available land, zoning laws, suburbanization and the post-war boom. There’s a lot to be said about how the construction of the ideal American lifestyle produced a comfort with car travel that exists almost nowhere else in the world.
Some of those design decisions have to do with genuinely well-meaning reforms, such as implementing single-use zoning to separate residential areas from environmentally hazardous manufacturing zones. Other implementations purposefully accelerated racism.
Either way, cheap land, cheap housing and cheap transportation — all of which was federally subsidized, often with additional subsidies from states — meant people were free to live away from the city in housing-only developments, enabled by mass manufacturing of the car and taxpayer-funded roads and highways.
Urban development catered to this; streets that had been mixed-use for both pedestrians and vehicles were turned into roads exclusively for cars. Those streets were widened with more lanes and the lanes themselves widened. Cities passed ordinances requiring every building to have a certain number of parking spaces, based on its capacity or square footage.
Densely built infrastructure gave way to more spread-out infrastructure, with parking lots and garages occupying an ever-greater share of the urban environment.
Cars take up far more space per person than any other common mode of transport. That not only consumes direct travel infrastructure — requiring more road space per person traveling — but also static infrastructure. Very little space needs to be dedicated to bike parking, but cities pass laws that require large parts of critical space be consumed by parking lots.
An image depicting how much road space 60 people take up, courtesy of the Cycling Promotion Fund. This image was produced in 2012, but similar images have been produced before, like in Germany in 1991 and the United Kingdom in 1965.
One-fifth of all land in city centers is now dedicated to parking, and some areas of many cities are far more parking than they are building — meaning far more space is dedicated to having places to put one’s car than space dedicated to why people are going there in the first place.
This wasn’t a switch that flipped overnight in the 1950s. Rather, city planners consciously made these kinds of decisions on a continuous basis in the following decades, with city planning culture only just now beginning to change.
Steve Lassiter sent these shots to Streetsblog USA, taken from the same vantage point in Tulsa, 30 years apart — once in 1978 and once in 2005. Not only do we see buildings demolished for flat parking spaces, but it also appears that one of the buildings we can see is now, itself, a parking garage.
This does not make commuting faster or easier, either. Parking spaces are a factor in what planners call “induced demand,” where perceived ease of car access encourages people to commute with their vehicles, congesting traffic and increasing travel time despite attempting to reduce it.
Amazingly, more parking also — by reducing building density — fosters more car dependence because desirable locations are spaced further and further apart. Reducing parking minimums in many cities resulted in lower housing and rental prices by opening up more land to development of homes for all income levels — especially impacting those at low and extremely low income levels, in part because parking maintenance is a cost borne by renters.
Indeed, surface parking consumes space in major metropolitan areas that the Parking Reform Network estimates could house over half a million people. Surface parking tends to be significantly undertaxed relative to other properties, too, meaning cities are missing out on millions in taxable revenue when they allow significant surface parking development — $101 million in Los Angeles alone. All told, the value of the land held by surface parking in Los Angeles is likely over $14 billion, despite being assessed at nearly $5.5 billion.
Parking requirements in urban planning resemble lead therapy in medicine. Lead has antiseptic properties because it is toxic to microorganisms, and until the 20th century physicians prescribed lead to treat many ailments. One popular medical treatise recommended using lead as a therapy for abscesses, burns, cancer, contusions, gout, gunshot wounds, inflammation, itch, piles, rheumatism, ruptures, sprains, stiffness of the joints, and ulcers. Early physicians did not realize that lead is toxic to humans, and lead poisoning went largely unnoticed as a medical problem until the end of the nineteenth century.
…
Like lead therapy, minimum parking requirements produce a local benefit — they ensure that every land use can accommodate all the cars “drawn to the site”. But this local benefit comes at a high price to the whole city. Minimum parking requirements increase the density of both parking spaces and cars. More cars create more traffic congestion, which in turn provokes calls for more local remedies, such as street widening, intersection flaring, intelligent highways, and higher parking requirements. More cars also produce more exhaust emissions (which until recently included lead).
For decades, planners lost sight of the goal of effective urban planning: they planned for cars instead of people. While it made sense to plan for commutes, designing for commuting became the primary goal, rather than refocusing on what people need for a better experience in a neighborhood or city space.
Don’t Forget the Environment
Also relevant are environmental concerns. Large concrete surfaces contribute significantly to the urban heat island effect, absorbing sunlight and converting it into heat to a much greater extent than the vegetation or buildings they replaced.
Locally, heat can increase by up to 20 degrees in areas with large, flat concrete surfaces. That heat spreads, requiring more energy use by nearby infrastructure — like the mall or stadium — to cool the interior, thereby shunting more heat into the atmosphere.
On top of that, inducing car traffic exacerbates environmental problems. There are the climate concerns, of course, of running all these cars, which often have to sit idle for hours entering or exiting the busy lot.
That climate impact can be significant, but so too can the other problems associated with heavy car traffic. Fans and nearby residents are treated to the wonders of traffic emissions. Nitrogen oxides (both NO and NO2) from pollutants can increase the risk of asthma, other respiratory issues and heart failure.
They can also affect human health even if people don’t breathe in the nitrogen oxides directly. Those gases can react with organic compounds in the air to produce ground-level ozone, which also increases the risk of respiratory issues and cardiovascular disease.
These gases produce their own health problems, but the solid particulates in the exhaust also cause respiratory and cardiovascular issues, both through the chemical interactions and the physical irritation and damage these physical particulates induce.
On top of the nitrogen oxides are the PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and VOCs (volatile organic compounds). These elements contribute heavily to the carcinogenic risks associated with engine exhaust.
All of these harmful compounds then get washed into the water table. Importantly, vegetation can limit the rate at which harmful compounds enter local waterways — it serves an important filtering function, especially in the wetland areas that comprise the Meadowlands. Parking lots drastically undercut this capability while increasing the risk of flooding, even when (expensively) built with drainage in mind.
Mixed-use architecture and more greenery mitigate the flooding and compounding effects of harmful chemical compounds entering the environment, reducing strain on local cleanup resources.
There Is a Better Way
If not a giant parking lot, then what?
One element that seems to hold back skeptics of non-car centric design is a fixation on a single alternative solution. But we know that there are a dozen ways to improve on a design that limits the enormous land use involved with a flat parking lot.
Camp Nou, Barcelona in 2020. Photo by Joan Valls/Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The most obvious compromise solution is an underground or overground parking structure. The underground structure does avoid some of the environmental concerns associated with an asphalt lot, but might not be feasible in a lot of locations. The Meadowlands, a marsh, might be one such location.
But one can build an overground parking structure in that area. We know that in part because the ground is solid enough that builders felt confident to put in one of the largest NFL stadiums in the United States on the site. On top of that, there is a parking structure next door, at the nearby mall.
These don’t solve the problems of induced demand and are very expensive. Underground structures cost between $40,000 and $110,000 per parking space, at an average of $73,000 per space. Overground parking costs between $30,000 and $100,000 per parking space, with an average of $52,000 per space.
With about 28,000 parking spaces for overground parking currently at MetLife, that would be a cost of $1.4 billion. Surface parking costs between $5,000 and $10,000 per space, depending on the cost of the associated land and the cost of features and technology. That’s about $200 million, or $1.2 billion cheaper.
Wembley Stadium in London. (Photo by AMIR MAKAR/AFP via Getty Images)
This does, however, ignore the added potential benefits of freeing up all that extra land — 11 million square feet (9-10 million of which would be freed up this way) — which could be rented out or sold to local businesses, residential buildings or environmental beautification.
Again, one might be able to triple the value of the land being used if it is devoted to actual human activity rather than parking — so the $1.2 billion additional parking structure investment could be worth it.
But changing how the parking structure operates is dreaming small. It still invites traffic jams on the three tunnels or bridges connecting New York City to that area of New Jersey. It’s better, but as we said at the top: “better” is not the same as “good.”
There are a number of methods one could use to reduce overland parking requirements that do not require asking people to use rideshare programs instead of their own cars. Expansion of the existing overland rail lines is the most obvious and immediate solution; there are already stations built for this purpose, and it’s easier to expand a station than build new ones.
Land dedicated to rail lines would need to be minimally expanded instead of newly established. Doubling the capacity of the line, while somewhat expensive, is less expensive in the long run than the maintenance of roads and parking with high-volume traffic.
Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid. Image courtesy Google Earth
NJ Transit expanded capacity without adding lines for the World Cup, transporting about 20,000 fans per game. That fell substantially short of their goal, but if that expanded capacity is permanent, then it can provide room to redevelop at least 5,000 of the parking spots.
Adding a new line on top of that can liberate 10,000 more spots.
New dedicated bus lanes (as opposed to the temporary infrastructure set up for the World Cup) could reduce the required capacity by an additional 5,000 spots. There is some light at the end of the tunnel for this one — New Jersey is reviewing contracts to make that a possible permanent installation on a separate, dedicated roadway system.
For those genuinely traveling from well outside the local neighborhood, smaller, less intrusive park-and-rides can reduce congestion on the way to the stadium and distribute a more limited traffic load across low-traffic areas many miles away from the venue.
Pedestrian walkways and dedicated bike lanes can also alleviate the situation. It is not a significant distance as the crow flies — about six miles from Manhattan Island to the Meadowlands Sports Complex.
There could easily be an expansion of rental bikes for this purpose, with dedicated bike paths allowing users from across New Jersey and New York to reach the stadium and a large docking station in the area. More important than that, however, would be natural bike parking outside of the rental ecosystem.
Given that people living a mile away in New Jersey can’t even walk or bike to the stadium, this would be a substantial upgrade that would alleviate local traffic.
Could use more green spaces, but it’s not difficult to get to the stadium. US Bank Stadium, Courtesy of Google Earth.
After all, fans two miles away in Rutherford or Secaucus were forced to call rideshares, waiting 20 minutes for a car to show up, then another 20 minutes in traffic before getting out and walking (dangerously) along the side of the road for the last mile. This could easily be a 25-minute walk or 7-minute bike ride, given the right infrastructure.
These walking and biking paths can be built with environmental concerns about the wetlands in mind, especially because wetland restoration becomes much easier without the pollution from cars, the space needed for parking or highways, and the additional local heat generated by asphalt fields.
The key is that people are not limited to one solution. If the weather makes walking or biking impermissible, then dedicated bus and rail lines should still reroute traffic concerns. If disability accommodation requires specialized busing or an individual car, that should be an option as well.
The key is freedom — but not the kind that car advocates discuss, the type that requires a $20,000 buy-in. But movement capability for anyone who needs it in any way they need it.
Limiting every single person to the least efficient available mode of transport is asinine.
It Can Be Done
This has been done before. The size of MetLife is no deterrent. But we do need to be precise when we compare stadium infrastructure across continents.
“American cities have rediscovered the downtown stadium. They have not yet rediscovered the neighborhood stadium.”
There are significant distinctions between the purpose of stadiums in Europe and those in North America that are worth exploring. Europe has a wide range of stadium capacities, even among those serving teams in the same league. This is because most European stadiums usually serve a fanbase that is extremely local to the area.
But some of those stadiums still have enormous and comparable capacities in high-land value urban environments.
London alone has 17 professional soccer teams, six of whom play in the Premier League and another recently relegated to the EFL Championship League. That relegated team is the betting favorite for promotion back into the Premier League.
These stadiums seat between 17,000 and 75,000 fans, with many of them seating at least 40,000. They don’t bring in the majority of their fans from all over the city but rather ones local to the neighborhoods the stadiums are in. By contrast, American football stadiums tend to serve a regional fanbase, even when they bear a city's name rather than a state's.
That means people traveling not just from the city or its immediate suburbs, but exurbs and even further out of the city center to get to games — Lambeau Field seats over 80,000 people, and they do not all come from Green Bay; many come from Madison or Milwaukee, and even more from out of state like Iowa, Michigan or Minnesota.
In the United States, that kind of regional travel means driving. And driving requires parking.
Can you imagine losing such an incredible location? I can’t. Soldier Field, Photo by Quinn Harris/Getty Images.
This local/regional split is certainly relevant to the conversation, but it’s not enough to really excuse the poor urban design choices for some of these stadiums. After all, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans and Minneapolis were able to construct their stadiums into the fabric of the cities they represent.
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