Car Park House Share: Reclaiming Wellington's Car Parking Buildings

This thesis anticipates that inner city car parking buildings will become vacant as new car ownership models, such as car sharing, reduce the number of cars parked in cities. “Collaborative consumption” is changing the way that consumers own goods to a shared method where ownership is outsourced and goods become cheaper and more efficient to use. Car sharing is one such service where technology provides the basis for it to operate. High demand for housing in the Wellington CBD and a current housing stock shortfall provides an opportunity to adaptively re-use this vacant infrastructure for time share housing for transient workers, using the collaborative consumption model.  This research proposes that the conversion of carparking buildings into shared housing schemes is valid, and explores this by investigating what the consequences of car sharing might be on the city and how people interact with this infrastructure at a street scale. The thesis then explores the architectural possibility of how housing can make use of existing infrastructure for a new use. It explores the pedestrian reclamation of the parking building while acknowledging the architectural heritage of the car parking typology.