Parking Landscapes
Microcosms of Houston
Mai Okimoto
April 2025
Houston checks all the boxes of the American city: highways, strip malls, parking lots. But it takes driving—seeing its rawness firsthand—to begin to understand what draws people to a place that can seem, at first, so desolate. There’s a harshness to this landscape, its wet heat, endless asphalt, and, above all, its emptiness. It’s easy to imagine that most of the city’s seven million residents are in constant motion—and that the city itself exists within that motion, illuminated and transient.
But Houston is also this: the sun-baked signage lining the roadside; the low, stretched-out buildings they beckon toward, advertising a Washateria here, a bún suông place there, a nail salon, the check cashers. A simple turn off the road, a pause in the flow, reveals something more. Despite their shared vocabulary of unassuming forms, each cluster of buildings is a mikrokosmos of language, texture, and culture. In these spaces, the strip mall becomes not an afterthought, but something closer to a civic core. The photographs that follow are a modest record of this vast, overlooked terrain—a contribution to the many stories told about the American strip mall.
Southwest Freeway, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
11550 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6742 Hillcroft Avenue, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6742 Hillcroft Avenue, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6000 S Gessner Drive, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6000 S Gessner Drive, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
