The Importance of Public Spaces

15 min read

Democracies cannot flourish without widely shared public spaces—both real and imagined. Public spaces include physical places—like the halls of Congress and public streets, sidewalks, and parks; they also include public policies, services, and programs, such as Social Security, welfare, education, housing, police, fire, and transportation. Public spaces are further comprised of public ideas and discourse, meaning debates about all aspects of public life that are shared in the public square.

Formally, the public square is an open space that is designed for community gatherings, social activities and public events, such as city plazas, town greens, street corners, and market squares. More broadly, it includes any place where a story may be shared about public institutions and public life, like newspapers, magazines, television, radio, theaters, books, websites, blogs, pamphlets, and songs.

Safe, inclusive, and adequately funded public spaces transform society, help individuals, groups, and communities thrive, and strengthen democracy. They create political, social, cultural, and economic capital and improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness of government policies and programs by providing a place to meet neighbors, spend time with family and friends, debate public issues, and enjoy nature, sports, and the arts.

Too often, though, public spaces have been physically and rhetorically constructed in ways that divide us and threaten democracy. These “divide and conquer” strategies benefit the few at the expense of the many and reduce the ability of citizens to act together to promote the common weal—the well-being common to all of us.

Public spaces have also increasingly been disparaged, underfunded, or outright replaced by privately-owned ones. Public and private spaces may certainly perform some of the same functions, but they are not interchangeable—even when public resources support the private marketplace. The prime example is the implicit bargain between policy makers, civic groups, and business and labor leaders to primarily use private markets—supported by public resources—to reconstruct America’s economy after World War II and deliver important social democratic goals.

Private spaces are not the same as public spaces

Historian Lizbeth Cohen discusses how the free market was pushed as a better way of delivering economic prosperity and important social democratic goals after WWII—like political freedom, democratic participation, social integration, and socioeconomic equality. She calls this political, social, and economic contract the “Consumer’s Republic.” It is still endorsed today despite evidence that these privately-owned spaces are not the same as the public ones they replaced.

An example is the promotion of shopping malls as the new “civic centers” of suburban towns in the 1950s. Their private legal status permits their owners to restrict the free speech and assembly that are allowed, but mostly taken for granted, in the public spaces located outside “main street” stores and businesses—like parks, streets, and sidewalks. Moreover, the movement away from small towns and urban centers contributed to growing socioeconomic inequality and political unrest. Businesses closed once fewer people were shopping on Main Street and private and public spaces became less safe and accessible.

The reasons for the resulting political, social, and economic decay are complex. When businesses flee one area (small towns and cities) and relocate to another (suburbs), it increases unemployment and underemployment and encourages those with the most resources to leave for greener pastures. Their exit reduces corporate, sales, property, and personal income taxes, and impedes the ability of state and local governments to deal with issues like rising poverty, crime, and homelessness. Most state and local governments are required to balance their budgets, either by law or in their constitutions. They cannot temporarily run deficits during economic recessions in order to provide more public goods and services.

Rising crime is not solely the outcome of increased unemployment and poverty though. Shuttered stores and buildings restrict movement through the community and there are fewer people serving as an informal source of social control. More simply stated, people are less likely to commit a crime when other people are watching (“eyes on the street”) yet concerns about public safety foster social distrust and discourage free movement and socialization.

In the absence of the ability to temporarily run deficits, state and local governments have two options:

Raise taxes to fund more formal means of social control, such as expanding the police force or investing in more electronic surveillance; and/or
Transfer public funds away from programs that help individuals, businesses, and the community—like economic development, public health, and social welfare programs—and invest them in programs that police them.

Both solutions are problematic; they often lead to infringements on civil rights and liberties and escalate the flight of people and businesses to other communities, states, and overseas. This is what occurred in the so-called rustbelt, meaning the northeastern and mid-western states that lost manufacturing and other industries when businesses began chasing cheaper labor to the south and the west. Eventually, many of those businesses and jobs would move overseas.

The federal government, with its larger tax base and ability to run deficits, could have stepped in, as it did with the New Deal and Great Society programs of Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. That option, however, presumes that other parts of the country are willing to help out—either because of goodwill toward fellow citizens or through a process of “horse trading” in Congress, where members support a bill that does not help their constituents in return for other members supporting bills that do. The collapse of the New Deal liberal consensus, beginning with the election of Republican President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, fractured the coalition that had given the Democratic Party a governing majority to adopt these kinds of policies and programs. Since then, Republicans have worked with “New (conservative) Democrats” to replace modern liberalism with neoliberalism. While both are variants of classical liberalism, they are quite different from one another.

The political economy of public spaces

Classical liberalism emerged in the 19th century to protect individuals from the excessive power of governments. It includes the work of political economists, like Adam Smith, who advocated free trade as a way of minimizing political interference in people’s lives and the economy (laissez-faire). Smith actually supported government intervention in some important areas, like protecting intellectual property and raising taxes to support education and programs that assisted people during times of need, but the use of his writings to push unfettered free market capitalism resulted in many negative side effects, such as child labor, pollution, hunger, squalid living conditions, and poor health due to low pay, bad working conditions, and unsafe food and consumer products.

As evident in the New Deal and Great Society, modern liberalism evolved to mitigate these harms. It advocates regulating the private sector, expanding public goods and services, and developing social welfare programs—like unemployment insurance, social security, health care, and food stamps—to promote individual rights, foster economic prosperity, reduce socioeconomic inequality, and protect individuals and society from the risks and insecurities associated with unregulated capitalism. These programs could not have been adopted without a push from below and support from above, meaning people used public spaces to mobilize and policymakers responded by adopting political changes; they then used public debates to inform and mobilize citizens on behalf of new public spending and programs. Together, they built a winning political coalition through the power of their ideas and actions.

Neoliberalism, in contrast, views these programs as disincentives to work, save, and invest. Rather than staying out of the economy (laissez-faire), it supports using the government to actively promote capitalism globally and at home. Examples include free trade agreements, providing businesses and (largely) upper-income individuals with tax breaks to incentivize economic investment, deregulating the private sector, and privatizing the public sector. Privatization involves two things:

transferring publicly owned resources—like public lands, hospitals, housing, schools, and prisons—to the private sector; and/or
paying privately controlled entities to offer goods and services that had previously been provided by the government, like education and public safety.

While neoliberalism’s theory of change is that the prosperity from a dynamic private market would trickle down and avert the need for social welfare and criminal justice programs, research shows that a rising tide did not lift all boats. Instead, neoliberalism reduced democratic performance by fostering uneven economic development, increasing crime and socioeconomic inequality, stoking political and economic unrest, and reducing social trust, institutional trust, and social cohesion (see here, here, and here).

Trust, togetherness, and democratic performance

There are many reasons why social trust, institutional trust, and social cohesion are critical for democracy, but one is that they improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness of public goods and services.

Social trust is our belief in the honesty, integrity, and reliability of others.
Institutional trust conveys our faith in democratic political, social, and economic institutions.
Social cohesion arises when individuals are bonded together into social groups.

Each is developed at the societal level through a nation’s shared history and its political, social, and economic institutions.

It is important to note that social cohesion may actually enable a powerful minority to use its social, political, and/or economic capital to dominate institutions, act against the will of the majority, and/or exclude or infringe on the rights of others by creating feelings of “us versus them.” Yet, when tempered by strong democratic institutions and high levels of social and institutional trust, it too improves democratic performance by creating a sense of shared fate among citizens and encouraging them to work together to achieve common ends.

The good news is that research indicates the government is able to generate trust and social cohesion—even when policymakers had previously contributed to the decline of both. For example, institutions, more than cultural heritage, shaped negative attitudes towards the government and fellow citizens in Italy and eastern and central Europe, but the post-1940s development of new political and economic institutions in Italy resulted in positive changes in political and socioeconomic attitudes and behaviors.

The bad news is that trust in government and fellow citizens has been declining in the United States since the 1980s, when the gap between the rich and the poor began expanding and growing numbers of citizens felt shut out of the American dream. The lost sense of a shared fate contributed to declining faith in public institutions, private institutions, and all forms of authority, including the media, the military, and the professions—like doctors, lawyers, and priests (see here and here). Neoliberal policies and discourse provided the catalyst for growing socioeconomic inequality; it also curbed economic innovation and investment, reduced individual and collective health and well-being, and increased crime.

Education provides a key case study. The framing of education as a public good—meaning a good that provides broader societal benefits—was critical for America’s commitment to the creation of “common schools” in the 19th century. Funded by taxes and open to all in the community, regardless of income or religious background, these schools mostly served younger children but were expanded in the 20th century to include the construction of high schools and public colleges and universities. They also became racially integrated as a result of federal court decisions and legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Most of this expansion occurred at a time when people did not expect to benefit from paying higher taxes—either because they did not have children, their children were grown or attended private or religious schools, or their children were less likely to attend college or graduate from high school. Public education benefitted from widespread support because Americans believed it strengthened democracy and positively transformed society—even if they did not necessarily agree on the mechanisms through which public schools achieved these ends. Some of the reasons people offered were that public education would:

create informed citizens by developing knowledge, literacy, and other skills;
improve civic engagement by teaching American history and government and by providing citizens with the ability to independently assess important social, political, and economic issues;
reduce political and socioeconomic unrest by creating educational pathways to upward mobility—the American dream that individuals could rise above their birth circumstances through determination, initiative, and hard work; and,
foster tolerance, social trust, and social cohesion by creating spaces where children from different backgrounds could socialize, learn from one another, and work together toward common goals.

Public opinion polls indicate that support for public education has continued to be quite strong, but it began to wane among some groups as public schools became more inclusive by extending opportunities to low-income Americans, women, minorities, and those with special educational needs. Rather than fight for the hearts and minds of Americans, Republicans and conservative Democrats politicized it, meaning they used it for political gain. They have been eroding the willingness of Americans to invest in public education ever since by blaming schools and educators for declining economic competitiveness; framing education as a good that provides individual benefits—such as the development of human capital and the ability to get a job—versus broader societal benefits; starving public colleges and universities of funding so that they must charge higher tuition costs; defunding the public elementary and secondary schools that serve 90 percent of our nation’s children; and diverting public resources to private and semi-private alternatives, such as voucher programs that fund students who attend private, religious, and charter schools. The latter primarily benefit upper-income and wealthy Americans (see here, here, and here).

What can “we, the people” do?

The first step is to recognize that policymakers are not neutral actors in the formation, maintenance, and destruction of social trust, institutional trust, and social cohesion. The public sector was expanded from the late 19th century through the mid-1970s because businesses could not or would not redress the harms created by unregulated capitalism. Modern liberalism provided the language, policies, and legal and administrative structures to empower citizens to fight back, including the development of the regulatory state, growth of new social welfare programs, and expansion of individual and collective forms of political, social, and economic voice. Some examples of the latter are the adoption of the 19th and 17th Amendments, which allowed women to vote and citizens to directly elect U.S. senators; laws that supported the right to join unions and go on strike; the community participation requirements included in many Great Society programs, like Head Start; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history. All of these provided a counterweight to the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a small group of wealthy individuals and business leaders.

The growth of the national government, including, but not limited to, the creation of national highways and other large-scale public works projects, was especially crucial for fostering bridging and linking ties between otherwise disconnected groups. These ties are important because their inclusiveness expands access to political, social, and economic capital. The government is often the only actor with the capacity to create them in impoverished communities—where the residents get by because of their bonding ties with family and friends yet lack ties to the external resources that help individuals and communities thrive and get ahead.

The dismantling of the public sector hindered the government’s ability to fulfill this important function. The subsequent erosion of public goods and services has harmed all of us but especially middle class and low-income Americans. These groups are more reliant on public services and have historically used public-sector employment to enter or stay in the middle class. The same is true in many isolated rural communities, where residents are often more dependent on public services and employment because of a lack of private businesses. Neoliberalism downplays these negative side effects because it values individuals for their ability to contribute to the private economy while denigrating the (public and private) value created by the public sector and by committed public servants, like teachers, postal workers, firefighters, police officers, EMTs, conservation workers, food or occupational safety inspectors, highway maintenance and construction workers, and public health nurses, doctors, and scientists.

History shows that the key to fighting concentrated political and economic power is to choose individual and collective voice over apathy. Voice is any effort to change a disagreeable situation—such as providing feedback, speaking up, complaining, and expressing criticism. It is the primary way that citizens participate in a democratic society.

Some examples of individual acts of voice include voting, running for office, participating in campaigns, testifying in public hearings, serving as poll workers or on juries, boards, and commissions, sending letters to the editor or public officials, and writing public blogs. Collective acts include participating in political, social, and economic groups, organizations, and movements. Some examples are political parties, mutual aid societies, the civil rights movement, the NAACP, unions and farmers’ organizations, professional groups, and worker, consumer, and renter cooperatives. Even social groups that have no apparent economic or political purpose—such as bowling leagues, pickup sports games, and book clubs—may lead to economic and political voice because they provide members with social capital.

Social capital includes our weak ties to people from a wide range of backgrounds, as well as networks of trust and reciprocity. It improves access to information, resources, and other forms of political and economic capital, but also encourages people to take risks. Many people, for instance, will never participate in politics beyond the individual act of voting. Others would never open a business, go into politics, or try to influence political processes on their own yet may do so in the company of others. The contributions of relationships to the well-being of individuals, groups, and communities and the efficiency and effectiveness of democratic governments are two of the reasons why political scientists and sociologists have expressed concerns about both the erosion of social capital and the dismantling of the public spaces that contribute to its development.

Democracies thrive when people opt in for the common good. That includes using individual and collective voice to demand public spaces that serve the majority of Americans rather than those at the top of a political, economic, and social hierarchy. Our Public Space informs and helps these efforts by conducting, publishing, and disseminating research on ways to reimagine public spaces—with the goal of improving democratic participation; developing a more egalitarian society; fostering a sense of belonging and shared fate; and promoting healthy and thriving individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities.