By Jay Walljasper

Most discussions of public space usually wind up focusing on grand places like Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York, Pike Place Market in Seattle, or Old Havana in Cuba. These are spots that stir our souls and allow our imaginations to soar. They represent the pinnacle of human achievement in creating lively places where people love to gather.

The public places that matter most are the local gathering spots, which we can easily stop by coming home from work, running errands or strolling after dinner.

But that’s not the whole story of public spaces. While some great places inspire us with their grandeur, others comfort us with their familiarity. These are the places we enjoy every day: the cozy bench in front of the corner store, the frontyard flower patch tended by the lady down the street, the playground at the local park. That’s where we meet our neighbors, and feel a sense of belonging to a broader community.

Sure, it’s delightful to go on vacation and walk through great museums and impressive plazas. But the public places that matter most are the local gathering spots, which we can easily stop by coming home from work, running errands or strolling after dinner. The encounters here are spontaneous and often fruitful. We bump into an old friend and soon fall into a friendly conversation–with the result often being a cook-out scheduled for next weekend, a petition circulated about a community issue, or steps taken toward launching a new hobby, new business, even a new rock band.

Grassroots efforts have made New York's Washington Square Park the great place it is today.

It’s no exaggeration to say that these sorts of public places, modest as they may be, tucked away in neighborhoods all over the world, are the glue that holds society together. Without them, our lives would be more dangerous, more desperate, and more drab. Study after study in fields ranging from psychology to criminology show that communities where people are connected to one another are healthier, more prosperous and happier places. One of the most notable researchers exploring this subject, Harvard Public Policy professor Robert Putnam, identifies this phenomenon as “social capital”–meaning that the capacity for people to interact with their neighbors is every bit as important to a healthy society as investment capital is to a healthy economy.

Yet as important as these neighborhood places are, they receive remarkably little attention in our society. People rise up to prevent the desecration of prominent public places, but few raise a voice when local public places are threatened by, for instance, road “improvements” that steal some of the sidewalks along a popular local shopping street, diminishing streetlife in the area. Or when a national chain comes crashing into a community, chasing all the local merchants out of business. You can’t fight city hall, people say. Big boxes are inevitable. But Jane Jacobs showed this is how we lose our cities, not in big bites but in little nibbles.

When Jacobs herself joined with neighbors to protest plans to install a highway in Greenwich Village’s beloved Washington Square Park, many folks doubted they could beat city hall. But they tried and they won, and the park now stands as an internationally treasured example of a great public space. Indeed, a new generation of neighbors are now debating how best to maintain it as a lively place where all kinds of people can gather.

Indeed, we see all the signs that a worldwide movement to preserve and create vital neighborhood places is emerging. Several generations of grossly misguided urban planning, which saw any spot that might foster lively social activity as a threat to the public order and property values, have left us with many nearly lifeless neighborhoods. Sidewalks are scarce in many suburban areas and neighborhood businesses nearly gone from most towns and cities across North America. The organizing principle of community life today seems to be that you will use the automobile for every possible need–even making contact with your neighbors.

The cooperative wood-fired oven in Toronto's Dufferin Grove Park was the result of a community-led initiative to enliven the park. See more examples of great neighborhood ideas in the sidebar. (Image courtesy of Jutta Mason.)

This was once reluctantly accepted by most people as the modern way of progress. But no more! There’s a growing understanding–based on people’s experience of visiting great public places while traveling, on people’s exposure to ideas from researchers like Robert Putnam, and on people’s innate common sense–that to create good communities we need good places to hang-out with our friends and neighbors. And people everywhere–in suburbs, cities, and small towns–are beginning to take action. It can range from simple steps like forming a block club or moving lawn chairs to the front yard so you can greet passers-by to big projects like establishing pedestrian-friendly streets.

Project for Public Spaces is launching a new project to promote these exciting new developments–and we’d like your help. We’re compiling a list of ideas on the simple steps people can take to improve their own neighborhoods, which we hope to publish as a book and use as part of our Great Public Spaces website. Give us suggestions large and small about what can be done to make communities everywhere safer, livelier and more satisfying.

Please send your ideas to jay@pps.org. Include specific details of the projects if you have it, along with contact information and photographs if possible.

Paint It and They will Come

Residents of the low-income Columbia City neighborhood in Seattle saw a block of empty storefronts as the perfect place for starting the revitalization of their neighborhood. So grabbing brushes, they painted their vision for the business district right on the buildings–showing an ice cream parlor, a hardware store, a corner grocery and other shops they wanted to see open up in the neighborhood. The project attracted a lot of attention, including from business owners, and before long the block was full of new stores for the neighborhood.

Life on the Streets

Ellen Vanderslice liked her neighborhood in Northwest Portland except for one thing: the roaring traffic on a street that stood between her house the local playground. She would nervously stand on the curb with her two toddlers, sometimes for several minutes while cars raced by, before she felt it was safe to cross. It was time to do something about the problem, she felt, so she helped start the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition. Raising the issue of pedestrian safety and comfort, the Coalition staged rallies and gained a lot of coverage in the local press. Local politicians suddenly noticed the issue and Vanderslice soon found herself with a job at City Hall drafting plans on how to make Portland more pedestrian-friendly.

Cooking up Community in a Toronto Park

Faced with a local park that was feeling increasingly unsafe, a small group of neighbors in Toronto decided to take matters into their own hands. They reached out to the kids that some folks considered “toughs” to help build a Portuguese-style bread oven in the park. This project helped bring the community together and created a place in the park where neighbors come together to cook dinner together. Other improvements have been made to Dufferin Grove Park, and it has become a community gathering spot for people of all ages.