Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, received the 2023 Seaside Prize, which honors those who have significantly influenced how towns and cities are built and rebuilt to promote walkability, affordability, diversity, beauty and sustainability. The nonprofit Seaside Institute cited Shoup’s decades of radical rethinking regarding parking policy: “In his groundbreaking 2005 book ‘The High Cost of Free Parking’ and his work since then, Shoup changed the way cities view the relationship between parking and the built environment, traffic congestion, energy consumption and local economic development.” The Congress for the New Urbanism recently republished its original review of the book, which it credited with sparking a recent surge of parking reforms across the country. Shoup accepted his award at a symposium in Seaside, Florida, a community designed around the principles of New Urbanism. When he launched into the study of parking decades ago, the topic was “the lowest rung on the status ladder,” he said, but times have changed. “Attitudes toward planning for parking are beginning to shift from thoughtless acceptance to thoughtful criticism, and many planners now agree that parking reforms are necessary. Parking is far too important not to study.” The symposium featured other members of the UCLA Luskin community including doctoral student M. Nolan Gray, author of “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It,” and alumnus William Fulton, an urban planning consultant, author and former government official who studied under Shoup in the 1980s and helped present the Seaside Prize.

Watch the Seaside Prize award ceremony