'Parking problems date to ancient Rome. Julius Caesar banned vehicles from the city center at certain times to cut congestion, forcing drivers to stow them on the periphery.' Getty Images

My wife andI went shopping last night at a local megamall. By the time we'd finished eating at an adjacent restaurant, the mall itself was closed, which obliged us to walk all the way around it to get back to our car—a surreal schlep across several hundred acres of empty parking lot. The sodium vapor lighting hummed overhead. The sky was orange, and the stars obliterated. A huge and miserable barrenness lay all around us, like a hardpan ocean.

Surface parking lots are the largest built structures we come into contact with, and yet they are so ubiquitous and familiar that they have become a visual given, the dark matter in the automotive cosmos. So much effort and status is invested in the architecture of commercial buildings; it's remarkable that so little thought is given to the mesas of tarmac on which they sit. Eran Ben-Joseph's tidy study of surface parking lots makes these invisible spaces visible. Read these pages and you'll never un-see a parking lot again.

Parking problems predate the car. The original sin might have been Julius Caesar's. In the early 40s B.C., he prohibited chariots and large horse-drawn carts from Rome's commercial district at certain hours (much as London's anti-congestion regulations impose a fee on drivers entering the city center). The early chaos of 20th-century automobility spurred the development of "off-street" parking, with the first surface lots emerging in the 1920s. The soaring rates of private automobile ownership, particularly by women day-shoppers, left cities with few options. An attempt by Los Angeles in 1920 to ban private-car parking downtown resulted in an almost immediate collapse of local business. The ban was overturned 17 days later. By midcentury in America, with downtown merchants fleeing to the suburbs and building stock being pulled down, it was considered enlightened public policy to use surface lots as placeholders until long-term redevelopment could take hold.

Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

By Eran Ben-Joseph
MIT, 157 pages, $24.95

Along the way, cities developed zoning formulas to determine the number of parking spaces needed—typically, between six and 10 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor space. Mr. Ben-Joseph argues—as did Donald Shoup in "The High Cost of Free Parking" (2005)—that these ratios created an enormous oversupply of parking, designed to accommodate only two or three days of maximum use per year, like Black Friday. This seemingly minor miscalculation has had a dramatic effect on urban environments. In some U.S. cities, such as Little Rock, Ark., surface lots cover nearly a third of the land area. Mr. Ben-Joseph estimates that there are 500 million surface-lot parking spaces in the U.S., covering more than 3,590 square miles, a landmass larger than Puerto Rico.

Surface parking lots don't have to be ugly. As Mr. Ben-Joseph notes, a canopy of trees is an easy way to relieve the visual awfulness of a typical lot. Trees also help mitigate parking lots' contribution to the urban heat-island effect, in which vast stretches of blacktop act as thermal batteries, storing the sun's energy and radiating it back into the air at night.

Mr. Ben-Joseph estimates that planting enough trees to shade 50% of the surface-lot area in the U.S. would remove 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere and return 822,000 tons of oxygen. Unfortunately, he also estimates that the area currently shaded by trees to be around 2%. That's a lot of missing trees. Landscape design requirements for surface lots are typically weak and often left to developers' most minimal—that is, cheapest—interpretation.

The result is the sort of scant landscaping I saw in the mall parking lot: Marooned on tiny vegetated islands hundreds of yards apart were solitary river birches, too small and widely spaced to do much good.

As we walked across the lot we could also see, embedded in shallow swales, grated iron storm drains. Parking lots, typically built with impermeable asphalt and concrete curbing, contribute to water pollution and flash flooding by shunting rainwater (and contaminants picked up along the way) into creeks and streams rather than allowing the water to infiltrate the ground to recharge aquifers. An acre of parking lot produces 16 times the amount of runoff as an acre of grass. There are ways to make parking lots permeable: open paving blocks, for instance, or "bio-swales," which temporarily impound water before releasing it into the ground. That same 50% of tree cover that would scrub CO2 and supply oxygen would also mitigate two billion cubic meters of storm-water runoff. But these measures, too, cost money.

The malign effects of cost-cutting are a running theme in Mr. Ben-Joseph's book. Surface parking lots are the way they are—dirty, ugly, under-designed, badly lighted, unsustainable—only because they are so cheap. A space on a surface lot costs about $4,000 to build. The same space in a parking deck costs about $10,000, and in an underground parking structure upward of $20,000. Parking lots are almost always cost-driven design disasters.

Mr. Ben-Joseph does offer some parking-lot success stories, few that there are. He introduces us to the Herman Miller factory in Cherokee County, Ga., whose segmented, 550-car lot is sympathetically integrated into the surrounding woodscape. He also approvingly notes the canopied car plaza in front of the Dia:Beacon Museum in Beacon, N.Y. (a collaboration between American artist Robert Irwin and the architecture firm OpenOffice), where the angled planters separating the parking spaces point the way to the museum entrance. Renzo Piano, redesigning the old Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy, took a similar approach, creating dense and splendid colonnades of trees.

But Mr. Ben-Joseph—whose authorial temperament is as flat and smooth as freshly rolled macadam—does not go so far as to "champion the abolition of surface parking lots or . . . advocate the creation of strict codes and standards that dictate their design." In the spirit of the 20th-century landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson, who preached a love of everyday places, Mr. Ben-Joseph seems to want to find beauty in these sad parcels, as they are.

That's an agreeable life strategy, finding the good in things. And yet it's also a source of frustration for the reader. Why doesn't he advocate for better standards? What prevents us from covering open lots with solar panels, a practice that, according to Mr. Ben-Joseph, could potentially generate enough electricity every day to power 11 million homes for a month? Frankly, I would like less in the way of academic musing and more in the way of prescriptive solutions.

Mr. Ben-Joseph is also guilty of sociological overreach. "Parking lots are a central part of our social and cultural life," he writes, calling them "a modern-day common." Wait, what? They are? Yes, teenagers gather in parking lots for one rite of adolescence or another: fighting, racing, dancing. True, community farmers markets spring up over the weekend in business and municipal parking lots; tailgating is a ritualized feasting before sporting events; RV drivers form impromptu villages in Wal-Mart parking lots, a practice known as "boondocking."

But these interactions happen despite the forbidding nature of open parking lots, not because of them. I find parking lots to be intensely anti-social. I do not engage with strangers on my way to or from the car, and because these tracts are typically shelterless, there is no architectural cue as to where to congregate even if you wanted to. One can't let go of a child's hand in a parking lot for even a second. If you're in a car, a parking lot is an obstacle course to negotiate. If you're on foot, it's a place to escape unscathed.

Surface parking lots don't have to be the minimalist slabs of nowhere-ness we've grown accustomed to, Mr. Ben-Joseph suggests. Maybe. And yet there are few signs that this aspect of our infrastructure will get much better anytime soon. For now, I was glad to reach my car and drive away.

—Mr. Neil writes the "Rumble Seat" column for the Weekend Journal.