Maintaining Our Public Spaces to Maintain Our Democracy

When Alexa Bush started a collaborative park design process in the Fitzgerald neighborhood, Detroit was in transition. “The city was on the mend from bankruptcy,” says Bush, Design Director with the City of Detroit. “We realized that the park needed to sustain its own life.” Her team met the moment. Born of a fiscal crisis, demand for open space, and 26 vacant lots, Ella Fitzgerald Park is now a beloved meeting ground for basketball players and hula hoopers alike. Buttressed by resident stewardship and a neighborhood-focused workforce program, the park is a platform for social connection and recreation. It’s managing to ‘sustain its own life.’

Ella Fitzgerald Park is a model case of community-powered design, maintenance, and operations. It’s also a testament to how public spaces can guide a community’s recovery from a moment of crisis and decades of racist disinvestment. Now more than ever, investing in spaces like these — the civic infrastructure of our cities — can help shape our collective recovery from the social, economic and political crises laid bare by the pandemic. Yet, as Eric Klinenberg wrote in his recent New York Times essay, the current infrastructure proposal includes little investment in public spaces or the civic organizations that operate them. President Biden and Secretary Buttigieg, if you’re reading, we have evidence to make you reconsider.

Gehl’s recent research for Knight Foundation reinforces the vital role of civic infrastructure: public spaces that take varied forms, from neighborhood playgrounds to waterfront art havens. Spanning seven sites in four U.S. cities, the study illustrates how high-quality and community-led spaces aren’t just great to spend time in. They also catalyze outcomes in racial equity, health, and local economic development. By responding to community needs well before and after the ribbon-cutting — through pilot projects and local governance, for example — these spaces foster equitable access and resilience in crisis moments like the pandemic.

What’s more, these spaces are good for democracy. With the right level of community-led design and operations, public spaces build local trust, belonging, and participation in civic life. When we invest recovery funds in our public spaces, then, we do more than improve health and economies. We restore trust in the local institutions that make democracy work.

At Akron’s Summit Lake Park, decades of active disinvestment left many Black residents wary of incoming public space improvements. To address this head-on, a mix of public and non-profit stakeholders led a co-creative engagement process. Through in-depth listening sessions and pilot projects, residents regained trust in the civic process. “We saw the manifestation of this conversation bloom into actual fruits of the conversation,” says resident Grace Hudson. After the project, 97 percent of respondents felt the project had changed their neighborhood for the better, up from 57 percent at the outset.

Building on this momentum takes more than community participation, though. Long-range maintenance — through dedicated public and private funding — is needed to deepen people’s trust in local institutions. It can create jobs along the way, too. At Centennial Commons in Philadelphia, a workforce maintenance program hires locals and builds local pride.

When residents see their neighbors working to keep the area clean, it creates a sense of ownership.

Chris Spahr, Executive Director of Centennial Parkside CDC

Indeed, neighborhood maintenance is a boon for measures of a healthy civic life including community pride, trust in neighbors and satisfaction with local government, according to a 2017 study from the Center for Active Design. Public space maintenance is a visible marker of governments’ commitment to communities. Without it, communities feel unseen and underserved — which in turn erodes trust in civic institutions, from the local to the national. Unfortunately, we’re not on the right track. According to a recent National Recreation & Parks Association study, half of parks and recreation agencies reduced their 2021 operational spending.

Proactive investment in maintenance and preventative care isn’t just a challenge for public spaces. The pandemic has shown how simmering neglect of our most vital systems can quickly bubble to the surface. Our healthcare system was pushed to the brink but the outsized death toll speaks volumes about our insufficient focus on preventative health. Millions of people lost their jobs or housing, exposing how too many, for too long, have been teetering at the edge of an economic cliff. The pandemic response has been politicized, providing a new breeding ground for our decaying trust in institutions and each other. The lesson is clear. Without a sustained and systematic approach to funding and nurturing the institutions and organizations that care for people and places, we suffer and lose trust in them.

Public spaces should be no different. While not a panacea for our thorniest challenges, they are a prime starting point for an equitable, resilient recovery. Part of why we invest in infrastructure is because we can see it, feel it and experience it. In this year of living locally, more and more Americans began to see, feel and experience their communities’ public spaces. We took up biking on streets closed to cars. We got our social fix at parks programming. We dined at curbside restaurants in one-time parking spots. And the spaces that best adapted in the pandemic were the ones with a strong foundation of local engagement. The importance of public space hasn’t changed, but our collective understanding of its value has.

Now is the moment to commit to public space as vital civic infrastructure that improves health, generates jobs and supports civic life. Delivering on this promise, though, means funding what makes public spaces hum: people and the essential work they do to keep them open and inviting to all. We are recovering more than our health and economic security. We are recovering our trust in government. To get there, we need sustained investment in our public spaces. 

This article was originally published on Reimagining the Civic Commons.