Public Space and Public Health: Radical mutuality in the civic commons
A conversation with Dana Bourland, Vice President, Environment, The JPB Foundation
Dana Bourland works at the intersection of health, poverty and the environment. For the past seven years, she’s headed up The JPB Foundation’s Environment practice, where she has focused on supporting organizations working toward a just and clean energy transition, increasing access to natural areas and detoxifying the built environment.
We caught up with Dana to talk about public space, public health, climate resilience, social connection and the many ways these critical issues intersect and impact people’s lives.
Q: Public health experts are increasingly concerned with the social and economic circumstances of people’s lives, including access to public space. How does a lack of vibrant public spaces impact health?
A: I grew up in England and have lived in two other countries and five U.S. states. Exposure to different places and different people has instilled in me a love of exploration. I have travelled far to places like Nuku Hiva in French Polynesia, and closer to home to places like Appalachia. In all my exploring, I have witnessed that the places where we incarcerate and detain people are hard, bland, and often made out of grey cement blocks. They are made to be devoid of nature and designed to deprive us of human dignity. They are often loud and jarring. These are places of isolation and punishment.
While I don’t agree with how we design our prisons, I see similar design methods and materials used for our public spaces. Why are we designing public spaces that separate and isolate us? Are we intentionally encouraging people to pass through quickly, or not at all? Are we attempting to protect ourselves from one another?
A tiny public space I love to visit is just a block and a half from where I work. Called Greenacre Park and nestled between two buildings, it’s about the size of an elementary school classroom. You almost don’t know it’s there. There are a few trees and a few tables and chairs dispersed throughout the space, but what sets it apart is the large waterfall-like feature. This little pocket park is occupied constantly, rain or shine, by people having lunch or just sitting in chairs they’ve moved to face the waterfall. Sitting so close to people you’ve yet to meet makes it easy to strike up a conversation about the weather, a conversation that might lead to other topics. All I need is fifteen minutes in this space and I return to work fresh and clear-headed.
This is not magic, but a place delivering the benefits that science has proven come from nature. No magicians, just intentional design and an experience of natural forces at work: the water cooling the ambient air temperature in hot weather; the sound of the waterfall drowning out the noise from the street; the trees absorbing air pollution and exhaling clean oxygen; and the bushes and verdant vegetation reducing cognitive fatigue and stress. Once you understand how things like isolation, air pollution and stress can lead to human disease, you can understand how a well-designed space can be a public health remedy.
Q: Why should leaders in American cities be concerned about what’s called “social isolation?”
A: The biggest gift my parents gave me was not the gift of life itself — it was the gift of having three brothers. I am lucky to have always had them in my life. But we live far from each other, and we often go months without connecting. And while I know I am not alone in a bustling city like New York I can feel alone, something I know many others feel. Just like the park near my office, we need to mimic nature in how we design our cities, not just in the placement and care of actual natural spaces but by providing people with an ecosystem around them. Even surrounded by people in a city, we’ve made it too easy to move around in isolation. I worry our lack of connection to people in public spaces is shredding away at the social fabric that undergirds our democracy, because when we no longer experience what we have in common with people around us, we stop considering how our decisions impact others.
As David Brooks notes, we need radical mutuality — the ability to treat each other as equals, regardless of our backgrounds and life paths. We need to weave back the holes we have shred in our social fabric where we have allowed ourselves to become socially isolated. At an early workshop for Reimagining the Civic Commons we were challenged to live out this work in our own lives. Since then I have been striking up conversations with people I meet in the park, the elevator, and on the train. It is in those exchanges where I learn what we have in common and our shared interests in the well-being of the community.
Not only does social isolation build walls between neighbors, but it is literally making us sick, and that is what leaders need to worry about. Former Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, didn’t find the most common pathology afflicting Americans to be heart disease or diabetes during his tenure — he found it was loneliness. That’s probably because forty percent of us now report that we often feel lonely. “Health is so much more than clinics and hospitals, and, in fact, the boundaries of health have to be extended to our entire community,” said Dr. Murthy. To overcome what is an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness we should examine our public spaces, reimagine their design for human connection and use them to encourage mutuality with one another.
Q: What are the kinds of things that need to happen in a public space to foster social connection?
A: There’s a lot that needs to happen, but simple solutions include taking down physical barriers of entry like fences and gates; providing nature; giving people ways to make music with free pianos; providing comfortable seating for two or more people. But before we change public spaces, the important first step is to ask people who use them what they need to connect with others. To foster authentic social connection, these spaces must first and foremost be designed and programmed by the public. We’ve seen the negative consequences of having public spaces not work because they were not designed for us and contain artifacts or monuments that do not recognize our history. It’s a disaster and waste of money. It can have long-term negative consequences when the space becomes a constant reminder of how alone we really are, and that not even our own community or local government recognizes us. The best way for public spaces to foster social connection is to have the public involved at every step along the way in every aspect of the process.
Q: What innovative efforts have you seen that use public space to combat social isolation and improve health?
A: At The JPB Foundation, we are actively supporting a campaign to increase everyone’s access to nature. We believe that everyone must have a safe and comfortable walk to a quality park within ten minutes of where they live. This includes many community-based organizations in cities across the country who are reimagining how that park can also deliver benefits like physical and mental health. The President of The JPB Foundation and I visited a community that is actualizing a ten-minute walk to a park for its residents. As we walked into the public space — complete with a beautiful inviting non-gated entrance — a resident of the neighborhood walked up to us. She wanted to know who we were and where we were from. She then shared with us the meaning of the sculpture in the park, told us about the park’s upcoming events, its morning exercise group, and the human school bus which leads children from the park to school.
The activities happening in that park aren’t fluffy, ‘nice to have’ fringe benefits. The reason Surgeon General Murthy was concerned about loneliness and isolation, is because as we decrease isolation and increase mutuality, we extend people’s lives. Radical mutuality can become a positive epidemic and a public health campaign, one that spreads joy, love, and well-being; emotions that in a highly technological age, we have underestimated. At JPB, we see them as being necessary to our quality and quantity of life.
Q: Is there an intersection between climate, resilience, and public health when we think about public spaces? If so, how can we use spaces to solve for more than just social isolation, but bring resilience and reduce our climate impact in these spaces as well?
A: The impacts of climate change are occurring across the globe and in every community in America. There is no safe public or private space: every space is impacted. Our dependence on fossil fuels has changed the environment in which all storms form. This then contributes to an increased incidence of extreme weather everywhere. We cannot afford to make any investments in infrastructure without considering its relationship to cleaner sources of energy, and ensuring it is adaptive to the impacts of extreme weather. That means all public spaces can either help reduce the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere and lessen the impacts of climate change, or they can be part of the problem and put people in harm’s way.
This challenge provides us a tremendous opportunity to reimagine every public space and explore how it might help:
- capture carbon
- cool the air temperature as heat intensifies, or
- detain rainwater as the atmosphere holds more moisture that is released in minutes during a big rain event.
We see more thoughtful design happening in places that are rebuilding after disaster, but we need to take these climate-resilient design principles to existing spaces as well. If we can apply an integrated design process that explores not only ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change, but ways to simultaneously enable social cohesion and relationships, we can mimic nature and make these public spaces do a multitude of things that will deliver health benefits and human happiness.
These can be lovely features like trees, bioswales, permeable pavers, and solar panels on structures in the public spaces that become emergency charging stations or provide electricity to the surrounding community. For example, in Akron’s Reimagining the Civic Commons work they have provided seating near the shade of trees and access to enjoy Summit Lake so that residents can cool off during hot summer days.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” When you sit in Greenacre Park near my office, not only are the trees exhaling, but so are the people. We are able to breathe. We realize in that moment that if nothing else, we share the air. From here we can explore the many other things and ways we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
