Parking garages run rampant, especially in Los Angeles. According to Gensler's co-CEO Andy Cohen there are 500 million parking spaces in the United States. “Think about all that real estate, all that attention to parking, that could be revitalized and reused for the future of our cities.” Today parking garages house a vast amount of underutilized space. Over time, the need for parking garages will dwindle and parking spaces will have to find an alternative purpose. Architects and urban planners are working through ways in which these gigantic structures can be turned into useful alternatives to developing housing, office space, and other spaces of function. 

Gensler is already in the works of transforming a part of Netflix's two-floor parking garage into new office space However, this isn't Gensler's first garage transformation. In Cincinnati, the architecture firm transformed 84.51's headquarters by converting 3 floors of indoor parking into office space. The idea of retrofitting these unused spaces has other firms like Perkins + Will jumping in to find ways parking garages can have a second life. 

"We’re kind of at this interesting moment right now" remarks Perkins + Will's senior urban designer Kristen Hall. "We’re probably going to be seeing full absorption of autonomous vehicles on the streets in anywhere from 10 to 30 years, [...] if you’re a developer looking at building a parking garage and you don’t really know if you’re going to be able to finance or have a consistent revenue stream for a parking garage for the next 30 years, we’re finally at that point where we’re actually having a lot of developer clients who are questioning the financial feasibility of building parking garages."

However, as excited as many firms and developers may be to retrofit, the overall process of transforming these garages into livable spaces isn't all that easy. Houston-based design firm UltraBarrio researches the structural feasibility of parking garages. “We have to really rethink the DNA of the garage altogether." UltraBarrio founder Marcus Martinez took interest in understanding the future potentials of parking garages while he was urbanism student at MIT. Considering different alternatives is key when finding opportunities for these underutilized parking spaces. Many architects and urban planners are exploring how underground parking garages could change the way we look at reusing space as well. 

Since underground parking garages don't have the same structural potential for reuse. Simply retrofitting these areas into office or residential spaces would not be as feasible. Projects like UltraBarrio's Parked to Place discusses how the parking garage should be looked at as a spatial mechanism. Through this approach Martinez discusses that, "the parking garage is viewed as a spatial mechanism that serves as an instrument for making an urban structure legible-- the type is elevated into an evolvable structure."