Author: Jay Walljasper
Teaser: A new movement is mobilizing to protect the shared public spaces that enable individuals to become a community.
Essay:
A new way of thinking about communities, the environment, and public life is beginning to take root across North America. It’s a grassroots phenomenon, one that is more likely to be discussed in local coffee shops than this year’s political debates. You’re more likely to read about it in your neighborhood newspaper than the New York Times. But it is gaining influence every day in small but important ways.
Some call it as an emerging social movement, although most folks see it as simply a set of common-sense ideas that can help everyone find more meaning and more pleasure in their daily lives.
At the heart of this phenomenon are growing numbers of people seeking places where they can comfortably gather with other people. Americans are hungry to infuse a new spirit of public life into their neighborhoods and towns. They want more and better parks, corner coffeeshops, pedestrian-friendly communities, farmer’s markets, lively business districts and Main Streets, bike paths, community centers, sidewalk cafes, youth facilities..
This is a growing social upsurge in favor of hanging out-a new emphasis on public spaces as an important but too often overlooked ingredient in our lives. The trend toward privatization in America over the past six decades has left many of us isolated, lonesome and bored. We crave places where we can interact with others as friends and fellow citizens..
You see signs of it everywhere. Suburbs across the continent eager to create a new sense of civic vibrance by building new downtowns-often from scratch. Urban neighborhoods restoring their sense of community by revitalizing business districts. A new focus on pedestrian amenities, bike paths, and mass transit in many locales. Even the boom in Starbuck’s and other coffee shops represents a widespread public desire to have some place to hang out..
This growing recognition of the vital importance of public spaces is closely linked to the renewed wave of interest in the commons-the essential common assets we all share and own. The very phrase “the commons” refers to actual public places that in many towns became town squares or parks. Indeed, the famous Boston Common stands today as one of America’s most vibrant urban spaces.
Public spaces are literal common ground. Our sense of community grows feeble if there are not places where people can come together to see one another. It becomes easy to ignore poverty and other injustices if so many people never share the same space as those whose lives are directly affected by those injustices. One wonders how much the rise of generous and wise social programs in European nations is linked with those countries’ strong traditions of civic squares and other public gathering spots..
Those who would categorize the decline of our public spaces as a mere aesthetic annoyance don’t understand the importance of the commons in strengthening the fabric of our society. Democracy itself grows hollow if citizens don’t have a place to rub shoulders with one another.
At a time when serious concerns about political polarization and the fraying of our democratic traditions are in the air, this revival of interest in public spaces offers hope that we can still engage with one another in civil, productive ways as fellow citizens. With the general decline of public venues, from the town square to the corner tavern, where folks meet to discuss questions of the day, political debate has shifted to impersonal forums such as talk radio, where bullying and theatrics often crowd out reasoned discussion. Perhaps even more troubling to the future of our democracy is the fact that more and more Americans can turn to web sites, specialty publications and cable shows that tell them exactly what they want to hear. In the absence of real public places, where you come across people with other views, there is no engagement from different sides of political debates.
There are other mounting reasons that make it harder and harder to dismiss the issue of public spaces as a minor question of architectural aesthetics or civic do-goodism. America’s alarming rise in obesity, for instance, is being blamed by authorities in many fields on the fact that fewer Americans today go out for a walk or other form of outdoor exercise. The chief reason is that there are few attractive or safe places to walk, run, bike, or play in our car-dominated communities. This problem has become a flashpoint for many observers; it’s a potent symbol of what’s wrong with how we look at places.
Restoring a sense of place to modern life also offers an answer to one of the most pressing cultural questions of our time: the diminishment of local character, customs, and color in an age of one-size-fits-all globalization. The whole world is perilously close to watching the same TV shows, wearing the same well-advertised fashions, listening to the same tunes. Will the planet end up as one big shopping mall with the corporate entertainment complex calling the shots? The answer will be no if people still have the chance to hit the streets in their own town, hang out with one another, and put their own unique local stamp on language, music, fashion, arts, dancing, humor, ideas, and other human endeavor. But if the vitality of public spaces declines, then it becomes increasingly hard to create a local, homegrown alternative to globalized cultural commodities.
This new concern about public spaces transcends conventional categories of left, right, and center, uniting people who fancy themselves avant-garde innovators and those who feel cozily at home in the middle of the mainstream. In fact, it’s hard to conceive of any thoughtful people who wouldn’t endorse the idea of fostering a vital and nourishing sense of place everywhere that people live, work, and play.
Jay Walljasper is executive editor of Ode magazine and a senior fellow of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, which helps communities around the world improve their sense of place. (www.pps.org)