Public spaces and community
When I walk around my neighborhood, one painful sight is the increased number of “for rent” and “for sale” signs on businesses. It’s a reminder of the hardships that many businesses are experiencing and will continue to face. In the U.S., more than 15,000 stores could close by the end of the year.
With each new “for rent” sign on a commercial space, I feel the neighborhood’s vibrancy fade.
Why do shuttering stores, bars, and restaurants impact how I feel about my neighborhood?
Today, we’ll talk about why and how public spaces contribute to people’s sense of community and look ahead at how access to public space might impact people’s experience in the year(s) ahead.
Outdoor bar terrace season: better days in my neighborhood in Montreal. Image source.
What is sense of community and why does it matter?
Our sense of community is made up for four related elements:
The feeling that we belong to our community
Our emotional attachment to our community
The feeling that our needs will be met by our community
The belief that we matter to our community, and that our community matters to us
Why does our sense of community matter? Well for one, a greater sense of community is associated with better mental health and fewer depressive symptoms, as well as other important health outcomes. It’s also linked to increased life satisfaction and decreased loneliness. This last outcome might be particularly important to consider as we’re currently living through what has been described as a “loneliness epidemic”, only exacerbated in recent weeks.
What predicts our sense of community differs based on where we live. In the country, a greater sense of community is best predicted by the number of close relatives living nearby. If you live in a remote area, knowing that you have family that you can rely on in a time of need may be more important than knowing your neighbors.
But in cities and other dense areas, a greater sense of community is better predicted by whether people know and interact with their neighbors. And public spaces can help us get to know and befriend our neighbors.
Public spaces can build community.
Public spaces where we meet with others, run into neighbors, and develop friendships were named third places by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, an apt label for the varied category of places outside of home and work that include bars, shops, cafes, restaurants, parks, churches, and barber shops, among others. Oldenburg’s work was apparently inspired by moving to a bleak suburban subdivision without such places. Desperate for a spot to casually hang out with others, he turned his garage into his own “third place” -- a bar with twice-weekly open hours.
Easily-accessible public spaces can help those of us who are city and suburb dwellers meet our neighbors and develop closer relationships with them.
For example, being able to walk to varied retail stores frequented by local residents has been associated with a greater sense of community (e.g., see here for evidence from Atlanta, and here from Portland, OR). Outdoor public spaces can help, too. People who have access to shared, green outdoor space where they meet their neighbors have a greater sense of community than those who don’t (e.g., see here for evidence from Chicago, and here from Columbus, OH).
What affects the relationship between public space and sense of community? A case study from Perth, Australia.
As part of a project named RESIDE, all Perth residents building homes in new housing developments between 2003 and 2005 were invited to participate in surveys about their experience to inform the city about how to better build healthy and sustainable communities.
One survey, deployed three years after residents moved into their homes, focused on their sense of community and its relationship to four key public space types where neighbors tended to interact with each other—public open space (e.g., parks), shops, community centers and schools.
Along with measuring residents’ sense of community, the survey measured how close residents felt they lived to each of the four types of public spaces, the quality of the four kinds of public spaces available to them (a measure that incorporated both the availability of public spaces and their perceived value), how often they used these spaces, how they used them, and a number of other individual and social characteristics.
The researchers calculated how far public spaces were to residents’ homes and completed an extensive audit of each public open space to assign it an objective quality score based on 10 attributes (e.g., Does the park have walking paths? A playground? An irrigated lawn?).
The researchers then associated the subjective and objective measures of residents’ environments with their sense of community. What did they find?
The quality of local shops and open spaces matters. And subjective quality matters more than their objective quality.
Residents who perceived their local shops and public open spaces as better quality had a greater sense of community.
But quality was in the eyes of the beholder.
Since researchers had both the subjective and objective measures of local public space quality, they were able to compare the two. There was a relationship between them, but it was pretty weak. While a park with a playground might be “objectively” better than a park without a playground, that might not matter to you if you don’t have a child and don’t use playgrounds.
The objective quality of public open spaces had no relationship to people’s sense of community.
This finding echoes a larger theme in research on people’s experience in environments: our subjective experience of an environment can be more informative than the objective attributes of the environment. For example, a large field study examining the link between physical characteristics of an office environment, satisfaction with individual environmental conditions, and overall satisfaction, found strong relationships between satisfaction with individual environmental conditions and overall satisfaction, but no direct links between physical characteristics and overall satisfaction.
Returning to the Perth study, perceived distance to public open spaces also mattered. People who believed they lived less than a 5-minute walk from a public open space had a greater sense of community than those who believe they lived further.
Interestingly, frequency of use didn’t seem to matter. The frequency of public open space use didn’t have a relationship to people’s sense of community, in line with the results of other research showing that people who spend more time in a shared open space don’t necessarily interact more with their neighbors. Living close to a park, even if you don’t visit it all that often, still offers benefits when you do go.
So, what’s next for city and suburb dwellers?
Based on these results, I wanted to raise a few predictions for how city dwellers’ sense of community might change depending on their access to different kinds of public space in the next year or two.
Parks and other public-public spaces will be an important buffer for communities. Some public spaces, like parks or libraries, are truly “public” in that they are owned by all of us collectively. Others, like coffee shops or bars are businesses (though their use might not require making a purchase, as Starbucks has tried to make clear).
Unlike businesses, public-public spaces are unlikely to close down in a recession. That means that people who live close to high-quality public-public spaces, especially parks, will continue to have access to spaces where they can socialize and run into their neighbors. Outdoor spaces, like parks, are also less likely to be the site of COVID outbreaks than indoor spaces, so I imagine they’ll have fewer use restrictions.
One caveat: climate will matter here. If you live in a cold climate, then a park offers fewer neighbor-meeting-perks in the winter, and you’ll have to rely on access to indoor public spaces. Meanwhile, people who live in warm climates and close to parks will continue to be kings.
Communities without a park will be more dependent on keeping quality privately-owned public spaces open. And those who perceive that the quality of their local public spaces drops as businesses close will likely feel a loss to their sense of community.
A drop in perceived quality might have little to do with the number of spaces that close. Instead, a drop in quality might have to do with how unique the closing public spaces were and whether they were meaningful to the neighborhood. For example, if a neighborhood had five coffee shops, the closing of one might not affect residents’ perceived quality of available options. But if it only had one coffee shop, then its loss would have a much bigger impact. Suburbs or city areas with fewer instances of each public space type may be more vulnerable when it comes to sense of community.
Life stage will matter. While some public spaces are used by people of all ages, others are more meaningful to people in a particular life stage. People with young children might feel impacted by shortened hours at the library, or the loss of a children’s clothing store, while older people might feel the loss of a community center or a beloved lunch spot.
Restrictions will determine whether indoor public spaces can support community. If a coffee shop is open but only allows three people in at a time, then it does little to allow neighbors to run into each other and to socialize. Likewise, if older adults are restricted from visiting certain public places (e.g., libraries), then those spaces would no longer support the needs of that population nor support its sense of community.
Do you agree? Or do you have different predictions for what might happen to our public spaces and sense of community? Let me know!
It’ll be interesting to see how public spaces adapt. And in the meantime, you’ll find me rooting for my neighborhood businesses. And visiting parks.
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