Social Resilience Through Transformative Public Spaces
In October 2019, Carol Coletta, the President and Executive Director of the Memphis River Parks Partnership, delivered remarks on the civic commons to the U.S. Green Building Association South Florida GalaVerde 2019 in Miami. This post is edited from her remarks.
“In the Land of Self-Defeat.” This grim headline is from a recent opinion piece in the New York Times. Monica Potts wrote about her return to living in her small hometown in rural Arkansas, a place where residents grow ever-more resistant to public services, public institutions and the taxes that fund them.
As Potts observed:“People here think life has taken a turn for the worse. What’s also true, though, is that many here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them and to retreat from community life… concentrating instead on taking care of themselves and their own families. It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.”
A recent fight over money to staff the local library led her to conclude:
“The library fight was, itself, a fight over what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here.” (Emphases are mine.)
Reading this, I began to wonder: are all American cities and towns doomed to become “Lands of Self-Defeat?”
Bridging the gaps in public trust
The answer to this question matters to those of us working on public spaces, on urban planning, on transportation, on sustainability, on any necessary public service. It matters because we are tackling very big issues that cannot be tackled alone. You can design and build a sustainable building, but if its occupants have to commute 90 minutes in a car to get there, the green impact of the building is greatly reduced. Likewise, there are no real, long-term solutions to address climate change that work for only a few of us. Solutions have to work for all of us.
Fundamentally, solving big problems requires caring about the well-being of others. It requires trusting government. Yet in today’s world, where it appears we are willing to sacrifice very little for others, this can feel impossible. Especially when trust in all institutions — and in each other — is declining.
But even as distrust grows, Americans agree by landslide margins that low levels of trust are making problem-solving harder. Seventy-one percent of Americans believe — at least in principle — that the best way to navigate life is to work together. A large majority — 86 percent — believe we can increase our trust in each other. We believe the fixes are in less tribalism, more respect for others, more kindness, more cooperation (especially on local projects), being more personally honest, electing better leaders, and reforming the news.
Questions remain: Are we willing to change? Can we begin to trust each other more?
Can we translate that increase in trust to stronger, more equitable communities that, in turn, create a stronger democracy — a democracy capable of taking on the biggest challenges we face?
Creating democratic spaces where everyone can meet
As unlikely as it may seem, this is where transforming public space comes in. Because public space may just well be the most likely way for us to rebuild trust.
Public space is the easiest, lowest risk way for us to come face to face with people who aren’t like us. And that’s important because creating places where everyone belongs and that generate shared experiences among people of all incomes and backgrounds is fundamental to this experiment called the United States of America.
In public space, if we can come face to face repeatedly with people unlike us, we can gain familiarity. If we gain familiarity, we can gain empathy. Without empathy, it is impossible to create equitable, resilient communities.
And as we gain empathy, we can build a feeling that “we’re all in this together.” We build community. And if we build community, we strengthen our belief that we can get things done together — even sometimes through a government we create together. We strengthen democracy.
You might say: But public space is everywhere! If public space is an elixir, why are we in the state we’re in? Why doesn’t empathy abound? Why aren’t we solving big problems? Why isn’t our democracy robust? I would argue that it all begins with our disappearing civic commons.
Public space is one thing, and a shared civic commons — where we share space with people whose lives are different than ours — is another. Our civic commons has in part disappeared because we’ve designed our communities in ways that make opting-out of community life easier than opting-in.
For example, we’ve made it really hard for rich people and poor people to find themselves in the same place because today, we are segregated by income more than ever before. The proportion of American families living in either predominantly low-income or predominantly affluent neighborhoods has more than doubled since 1970.
The opportunity to create, once again, a robust civic commons is right in front of us. Because seemingly modest civic assets such as libraries, parks, plazas, rec centers, trails, cultural centers, shared transit — assets that exist in every community — have outsized power when it comes to building community. Using these assets to do more requires very little risk.
Unlike buying a house (for most Americans their largest single investment) or choosing a child’s school (which may determine which college he or she can attend) entering and exiting a park, a plaza, or a library is a small stakes decision. That’s what makes it such a powerful platform for rebuilding trust and our ability to get things done together. And yet too many communities have neglected their civic assets for decades.
Leveraging the spaces we own: From RiverPlay to River Garden
But what would a city look like that put every single one of its assets to work to connect people of all backgrounds and cultivate trust? What if we intentionally used these assets to increase equity and resiliency?
These are questions we’ve been exploring the past three years through Reimagining the Civic Commons. In Memphis we’ve had the opportunity to work along the Memphis riverfront to transform a space I had always known as Jefferson Davis Park. (Yes, that Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.)
Only .8 acres, for years it barely qualified as a park — a few trees, some grass, nothing to invite you into the space and no real pay-off if you did happen to visit. The “park” felt oddly isolated. It was literally no one’s park. But it did sit at a critical and beautiful location along the Mississippi River.
When we began focusing on using this place as part of Memphis’ civic commons, we weren’t sure where to begin. We didn’t know who might use it or whether anyone would use it. So we decided to conduct a test.
The result was RiverPlay. We took back a street with very fast traffic that separated the park from downtown, created basketball courts — our city’s favorite pastime — added some games, and importantly — added staff to be friendly faces for visitors and to orchestrate activity.
Predictably, people in cars weren’t happy, but we had a hugely successful summer of activity. People rediscovered the space and demonstrated they would happily share it with strangers. That successful summer created the appetite for a real park.
Our next step was to undertake a park transformation. It was wonderfully reimagined and just over one year ago, it was relaunched as River Garden.
A beautiful, convivial, playful space, it provides respite, it is a social platform, and a connector. It has put people who can’t afford a boat on the water, many for the first time.
River Garden’s landscaping is resilient, and much of the park was made by the community.
Perhaps most importantly, the making, operation and programming of the park is being used as a means of advancing equity in a city that must advance equity. It is staffed to welcome people and maintain very high standards according to a set of norms the staff developed themselves.
Best of all, River Garden is now beloved and a source of pride. And it informs everything we want to do in the future on the riverfront and in our parks citywide.
Lessons for city leaders
We’ve learned some important lessons about creating the civic commons along the way:
1. Testing an idea before you do anything permanent leads to a better outcome, if you pay attention to what you can learn.
2. The space you have to work with doesn’t have to be big to have a big impact.
3. Design matters. Making public space that attracts people across the income spectrum, in particular, requires seduction. People increasingly must be seduced into using public space.
4. We need to bring staff generalists back into public space — the staff who welcome, keep order, keep it clean, who facilitate a friendly atmosphere. These staff make space human. And we need human.
Last, we’ve also learned that we can and must use the civic commons to elevate equity with decisions about:
· who we invite to take part in its creation
· who we hire to build it
· who we hire to staff it and the agency they are expected to exercise
· how we leverage value in nearby neighborhoods
· how we get people who don’t normally mix to share the space joyfully together.
Every programming decision we make, every Instagram post we make must answer the question, “Does this appeal across income, race and age? And if not, why not and is it worth doing?”
In the end, all of us must reinvent social resilience among residents of our communities, or else our work will be for naught. We have an opportunity right now to reinvent the places where our paths cross with people of all backgrounds, where a shared sense of identity is created, social capital is multiplied, trust is cultivated, and our empathy for others is bolstered.
Creating the civic commons is the work of all of us. And with the challenges we face today, I can’t think of anything more urgent.
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.
