Unlocking The Potential Of Public Space To Connect People

Ask anyone shopping for a new home what amenities are most important to them and public spaces always top the list. Trails, parks, outdoor areas, and a cafe to walk to and meet friends and neighbors are the precious “spaces in between” that repeatedly are the most requested amenities.

Vikas Mehta, professor of urban design and Ohio Eminent Scholar of urban/environmental design at the University of Cincinnati School of Planning, has devoted much of his career to the study of public space. His book “Public Space: Notes on Why It Matters, What We Should Know, and How to Realize Its Potential” was so insightful, I read it twice. I recently spoke with Mehta to garner more insights into the design and activation of public space.

What Is Public Space?

“Public space provides the setting to remove us from home and work to nurture oneself, to manage stress, and create a sense of balance,” writes Mehta. “This ability to be in an unroutinized space is central to physical and mental well-being. Not only can it directly reduce anxiety and depression, but it can also be uplifting.”

Baked into this idea are hints at the wellness benefits of shared public space—stress reduction, emotional connection, and encouragement of physical activity. There are important nuances in what’s “public”—i.e., open, available, accessible, common, shared, collective, inclusive, visible, belonging to everyone—that impact how we design, program, and maintain the space.

Also important, and at times overlooked, is the fact that public space means different things to different people.

A resilient, appealing, and just city will have robust and varied scales and types of public spaces,” writes Mehta.

This is an important point for him, and he reflected on it when we spoke:

It’s a place where there is visibility of many, if not most, and out of the visibility, there are passive and hopefully active interactions between each of these groups, each of these people. Open-ended space welcomes the difference in backgrounds, cultures, and outlooks that may sometimes result in social tension, but it makes way for learning through new experiences,” he explained.

Said another way, proximity breeds understanding, and we can all use more of that today.

Why Does It Matter?

Urban sociologist and author Ray Oldenburg famously coined the term “third spaces” to describe a place that is neither home nor work, but a place where people can gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably. Drawing on his own foundational research with sociologists, philosophers, and others in the social sciences, Mehta codified the benefits of public third spaces to different groups as follows:

For individuals: Provides developmental, psychological, and physiological health benefits and opens up venues for entrepreneurship and economic activities.
For groups: Provides a place for sharing, creating identity, building a sense of community, and sharing a collective voice.
For society at large: Provides a space for social cohesion and active citizenship.
For cities: Acts as a powerful symbol to compete in the local and global economy.

Two examples bring these benefits into clear focus. First, public space is a place for play, with benefits extending beyond just entertainment. Mehta explains, “Play in public spaces creates a reason for, and thrives on, encounters—for finding other players and new companions as well as an audience. Play acts as the external stimulus that creates a common link for strangers to communicate verbally and non-verbally.”

I experienced this first-hand in Mexico earlier this year when our 3-year-old grandson was playing in the sand and began to share his buckets, shovels, and trucks with a 7-year-old local Mexican girl. Neither spoke the other’s language, but they developed a shared bond and made-up shared games for more than an hour. This play helped them learn new ways to relate to each other.

The second example is the power of connection.

Even passive interactions in public space reinforce the sense of community and reduce the feeling of loneliness that medical professionals now consider a serious pathology,” writes Mehta.

Anyone involved in creating communities has stories to share where neighbors met and became fast friends, sometimes with deeper bonds than immediate family.

Some of the most famous public spaces — The Highline in New York City, Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Las Ramblas in Barcelona, etc. — are iconic but also urban spaces. I asked Mehta how public space in the suburban context differs.

A large part of the American landscape is suburban, and so we can’t just say, ‘Oh well, just forget about it and try to move everybody to the city,’” he explained. “So, it’s more placemaking, creating moments where people can see, ‘Hey, this is a social space,’ whether it’s a small part of a street with just two shops or an area outside a school that is shared and becomes a community garden.”

Access to Public Space

In the book, Mehta calls out nuanced considerations regarding access to public space. These need to be examined, from the ground up, for public spaces to be sustainable, and to add value to place long term.

Legal – Who owns it?
Economic – Who pays for it?
Management – Who operates it?
Physical/Spatial – What does it look like? How does it contribute to a sense of place?
Social – Who uses it? How does it contribute to activities?
Political – How does it contribute to democracy?

I can’t help but think these considerations make the case for the “lighter, quicker, cheaper” model of community placemaking, advocated by the Project for Public Spaces. Mehta calls it out directly, noting

Excessive maintenance may erode the value of public space for many, effectively diminishing its publicness.”

The lesson here is it doesn’t have to be big and expensive; it just needs to be social, open, and a place where life happens. The case for early-stage incremental retail in new communities (way before 4,000 rooftops and a commercial brokerage model says it will pencil) as essential public space is clear, too, as Mehta explains, “The act of buying and selling, eating and drinking may seem banal, but these and other everyday patterns of daily life are catalysts of publicness.”

Resilience and Public Space

According to Mehta, climate change, social injustices based on historical racism, classism, and gender biases, and public health “are crises that have magnified the structural faults and injustices in societies including extreme income and wealth inequality, housing shortage, the disparities in access to education, healthy food and healthcare, and several other basic human needs and resources. Public space has the unique power to address these challenges and, at least in part, ameliorate some of these injustices by being conceived as a place of restoration, emancipation, and healing.”

Well-designed public space has a central role in overall resilience, providing and encouraging:

Environmental resilience
Civic practice
Public health and well-being
New cultural identities and social cohesion
Informal economyImagination and play

Creating Better Public Spaces

The quintessential image of public space does not have to be a child playing in a children’s playground with a disengaged and bored-stiff parent standing by the side, staring at a phone screen. Creating public spaces that respond to diverse motivations and desires will generate multiple reasons for many diverse groups to inhabit and cohabit public space,” writes Mehta in setting up his book’s conclusion, which offers ideas for how to implement better public spaces. These are five of my favorites:

Welcome the Vendors: They provide early activation like pop-up retail, often requiring only temporary right-of-way access to space. Vendors provide an easy and inexpensive way to increase the range and mix of goods and services available, and they support an entrepreneurial culture.
Make It Sittable: Seating provides incentives for people to stay in public spaces longer and encourages more social behavior. Think about movable seating that can be configured to accommodate different sizes of groups, both those wanting to engage and those wanting a quiet place to passively observe.
Shelter the Pedestrian: Providing shade and shelter allows people to linger in the outdoors in all different conditions. And don’t forget the trees! They create shelter, plus a partially transparent overhead canopy and comfortable enclosure, reminiscent of more human-scaled spaces.
The New Proxemics: The pandemic showed us that public space can happen in uncommon places, like the ends of driveways, and we need to retain our expanded view of sociable space. Place is subjective and emotional, and public spaces can manifest on a street corner, in a shared garden, in a place with a great view, or the otherwise physically ordinary. It’s the repeated use that establishes an attachment to space and makes it a place.
Experiment and Tinker: Public space doesn’t need to be purposeful or explicit. It just needs to encourage interaction and engagement. Spaces that encourage experimentation balance the predictable and often unimaginable landscape of space types that proliferate cities and communities. Be bold, try some things and see what your community embraces.