(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 432: Why Public Space Matters

This week we’re joined by Setha Low to talk about her book Why Public Space Matters. We chat about using ethnography to understand space, emotional connections, and transforming the world through public space.

Below is an unedited full AI generated transcript.

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive.

Jeff Wood (1m 24s):
Setha Low, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Setha Low (1m 27s):
Thank you Jeffrey. We’re really excited to be here.

Jeff Wood (1m 29s):
Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Setha Low (1m 33s):
Let’s see. Well, I’m an anthropologist and I teach at the Graduate Center of the City, university of New York, where I’m a distinguished professor of geography, anthropology, environmental psychology, and most importantly, I’m director of the Public Space research group. And in terms of background, I’m kind of an unusual bird in that my first job was at the University of Pennsylvania and I was recruited by a man India to teach how health could be an outcome of good planning and design in the Department of Landscape architecture and regional planning.

Setha Low (2m 13s):
Ian had this idea that if he could get himself a medical anthropologist who knew about health and wellbeing, he could make planning to design, really make a difference in our everyday lives. And of course, only today I think, are we really seeing the outcome of that? But it changed my career. I went from being a medical anthropologist who studied health and and healthcare systems to being fascinated by the world of design and people in their environments and have spent the last, I don’t know, 30, 35 years doing research and everything from gated communities, plazas, parks, streets, sidewalks, public markets, any of the kinds of social institutions and places where people come together or that were highly privatized and where people were not allowed to come together.

Jeff Wood (3m 7s):
And you’ve worked with, you mentioned Ian Mcca in the book, you mentioned William H. White, interesting folks in your background in terms of who you’ve worked with in the past. I wonder how that’s kind of influenced you as your time has gone forward in terms of your research, in terms of your thinking about the environment built environment along those lines.

Setha Low (3m 24s):
Well, I mean, to be honest, I think that both Holly and White and Ian Mac carb were pretty foundational, cuz re remember, I’ve been limiting, Costa Rica had been an archeologist in El Salvador. I had done a growth study in Guatemala and I’m hired into a school of landscape architecture. I barely at in the beginning knew exactly what my role was going to be. And I think it’s through the guidance of these mentors and others at the time, people like Bob Hannah or Lori Oland who was still designing, began to realize that anthropologists could do something that designers couldn’t do.

Setha Low (4m 4s):
And that I had something unique to bring to design and planning that hadn’t been done before, which was everything from making the human side more visible, let’s say in some way of the, the impact on people of planning design, which we knew, but even Holly wasn’t focusing really on, on exactly how the design, we knew it made a difference, but how and why. And at a larger scale, Ian knew. But that intermediate scale, I mean, Ian was looking at the whole ecology and Holly was looking at the sort of, I call it the micro sociological dynamics of one-on-one interaction. And I was interested in how a place, a larger place, a neighborhood, a city, a region, would have an impact, and how people within that made a difference.

Setha Low (4m 54s):
The other thing I figured out fairly quickly was that in terms of coursework, that one of the things I could offer was a way to understand these dynamics. In other words, a methodology. And Anne had always wanted me to write a method so that there would be just one method for how you would study people in their environment. And I used to fight with him like crazy cause I, I was this pure researcher and I, there wasn’t one method, it depends on the problem and, and Holly White as you know, or your audience may or may not know really believed in film. He filmed everything. And then he would look at the film over and over and over, usually time consuming.

Setha Low (5m 38s):
And even Hollywood say to me, you know, not, not everybody has seven years to look at the same footage of film over and over and over again. That he agreed that we needed other methods. So Ian wanted one, Holly wanted something. And that’s kind of what I’ve been working on. Not just the studies themselves, but finding better ways to research people in their environment so that we can do a better job of planning and designing, of helping communities to do their own work of helping designers though as well, to do the work that I originally was doing.

Jeff Wood (6m 12s):
It’s interesting to think about those geographies too, those small spaces, the median spaces, the large spaces in the book, you cover a number of places which are fairly large and can’t be small. We had Billy on to talk about design with nature now and you know, they’re talking in parts about whole ecosystems, right? And then you get down to the nitty gritty, you can get down to a single neighborhood or a single house even in terms of pocket parks. I mean there’s just this small little space that brightens up somebody’s day. And so I’m interested in that too, in terms of your thoughts on geography and how that Im impacts public space and thinking about public space.

Setha Low (6m 44s):
What you you’re saying is that I think we need to be thinking about the impact of individuals at all these scales at one time. That’s what I hear you saying to me and that that that’s part of what I’m trying to communicate in the book, in that we can go all the way from the very broad ecological, but also look at a community garden, let’s say, and how does the community garden contribute to the overall ecolog eco services of a city as a whole or all the way from, you’re talking about a pocket park, but let’s say a bench. Just a bench on the sidewalk where during covid, people could no longer sit on that bench. And so where the, I don’t know, an old man and a woman used to sit every day and watch everyone to the smallest, smallest ecology, but building all the way up to what’s the relationship of that to the society as a whole or to sociality as a whole of how it is that our everyday small interactions, how do our ecological impacts on planning one tree or plant, what, how does that in fact become part of a full continuum?

Setha Low (7m 53s):
And that we need to be a lot more aware that these scales, these geographies all nest one into another and in fact jump up and down. By that, I mean, sometimes planting trees can have a major impact, let’s say on heat islands, or maybe having two benches and two trees on a corner that was very desolate could transform interaction in the neighborhood. That all of these scales are important. What I think we need to attend to is that they’re all happening at the same time, right there. These are all these processes that are happening at the same time. And I think it’s hard for us to think that way.

Setha Low (8m 34s):
I think it’s really tough,

Jeff Wood (8m 35s):
Especially outside of your immediate sphere, right? Your immediate observation area is hard to think about larger scales than that. I wanna go back to your discussion about methods a little bit and, and thinking about, you know, kind of ethnography and the ideas behind it and ask you kind of a general question of like, what is ethnography? Because I think it’s an interesting kind of way to approach the research that you’ve done.

Setha Low (8m 57s):
Well, ethnography is a word that gets overused and underused and has many, many meanings. I mean, an ethnography can be a book about a place you read an ethnography, but when I use that term, I mean a cultural description of a place, social scientific description that has a lot of depth and that doesn’t just query what people are doing. That would be like a behavioral description. Like I see the children running and playing as the mothers sit and watch them versus understanding the underlying rules and cultural mayor within which those mothers are watching those children, which might be that those mothers come every Saturday with their children in order to get their children to meet other women and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Setha Low (9m 53s):
So that the ethno, what an ethnography can do for you is look below what is so evident at the surface and understand what the underlying processes are. Those processes can be about power, they can be about inequality, they could be about prejudice, they could be about all kinds of things. And I’ve argued that what’s good about ethnography, because it’s quite a holistic kind of method, is that it shows you things you, you don’t already know. I mean, scientific processes require a hypothesis. You ask a question and often you know the answer to that question. Ethnography doesn’t quite work that way. I mean, you have some general questions like, what is the social life on this plaza?

Setha Low (10m 37s):
Or why is Lake we so important to the people in the Bronx? Or something, something general. But what, what happens by interviewing, observing, mapping, reading the history, oh, doing all kinds of things, walking with people, recording the sound, maybe even doing emotional mapping. What you do is you begin to understand a whole lot more than what people can tell you. People can’t tell you necessarily why they’re attached to a place. Maybe they can or why they love a place so much, but, and then sometimes people can’t tell you why a place has been abandoned. But ethnography, because it’s got so many nuanced ways of looking at things, has a way of bringing to the fore a lot of unarticulated, often embedded ideas, practices, and this kind of cultural mil within which things are happening that help us to understand what’s really going on.

Setha Low (11m 35s):
And I think that’s one of the points of the book that I, I’ve been trying to make, that’s trying to add to our discussion of public space. That it’s not just that people come into contact with one another in public space, especially with strangers. I think we’ve been talking about that for a long time. Richard sent so many people, Eli Anderson. But it is the kind of public culture that gets generated by people being together that is so critically important to making a space or place work. And regardless of the scale, I think that the cultural component of it is critical as is atmosphere, which is something I’m adding to that.

Setha Low (12m 18s):
But in terms of what you are asking, ethnography is the one method that is really the best at getting at what kind of culture is being built here, what are the problems, what are the conflicts? How are people experiencing this place? What does it mean to them? What memories and histories do they have here?

Jeff Wood (12m 35s):
I find that really fascinating too. And, and especially in the discussion of places like Jones Beach, where people have a history with the place, they have a, a mental map of the geography of where certain people go, of where, you know, things happen or don’t happen. And I find that really fascinating, especially people’s, you know, love or care for a place or how much they, they really appreciate it. And I think you brought that out really well in the book as well.

Setha Low (12m 58s):
I think that’s really critical. And I mean, isn’t that ultimately what it’s all about? If we can really understand how it is that we come together and attach and feel positively about a place that also facilitates our coming together as individuals, these things aren’t a part. I was listening to a actually podcast about Palestine and Israel, but thinking about the land that these are both peoples who identify with the land, but what if we think about all of our public spaces as places that multiple people identify with, multiple people are attached to, and multiple people often have positive feelings or very negative, it can even work the valence going the other way, but it provides a ground in which new things can happen and new kinds of relationships can happen, and new kinds of political organizing can happen and new kinds of ideas can happen.

Setha Low (13m 57s):
And the evidence is there that it matters. And the evidence is there that social justice can be really born in public space and is supported by it. But then you have to ask, well, how, and one of the pieces of this, how is through this public culture that gets developed and this other thing, I, I talk about that a little bit atmosphere. And so you go to Jones speech and you look out and see all those people and you go, wow, look at people, they look like me. They’re having a good time, they’re doing the same activities that I’m doing. I feel like I belong now in York or in America. And this tremendous sense of inclusion and belonging, which is so important to the very fabric of a society, especially the first one.

Jeff Wood (14m 43s):
Yeah, exactly.

Setha Low (14m 44s):
First one, I, I, yeah, I hated to throw that in, but especially one where everybody isn’t the same, we’re

Jeff Wood (14m 50s):
Really different. That’s true. And, and an important point, one of the things that you do mention is the importance of collective events in public spaces and bringing people together. And I’m, I’m wondering what is the impact of ritual and assembling crowds? People come together to watch a concert and they, they feel like they have a memory of a place or a good experience and they come away with kind of a sense of pride for the event or people or whatever may have happened in that space.

Setha Low (15m 17s):
I think you said it really beautifully. I mean, I think that public spaces are events and cultural celebrations and rituals are always in which people have always come together. And of course what’s happening is as spaces retreat or become more privatized or have many, many rules and regulations, you know, or, or surveilled in certain kinds of ways, those activities can’t happen as often. And yet there is absolutely no question that a positive event can create a kind of affective atmosphere which brings people together, have them create these positive memories and meanings, creates more care, also does things that we don’t think about so often.

Setha Low (15m 60s):
But recognition of difference occurs much more often when there is an atmosphere of enjoyment, of attachment, of tolerance. I use the example of the, the Yankees winning or losing and being in the parking lot, and if they win, everybody is like, pat did everybody else on the back. And you talk to all kinds of people you don’t know, right? Or you bump into somebody and they don’t mind. And there’s a lot of interaction just from the atmosphere of having won. And that’s an event that creates that, or like a concert, think of the kinds of feelings you have after you leave a concert with all these incredibly different people that you’ve been. And it’s really very different when the Yankees lose or when there is an event that’s very sobering.

Setha Low (16m 45s):
People pull into themselves and pull away and you keep talking about geography. And I think, I think you’re right. I think there are multiple scales of geographies, but more importantly I like really how you use that term. There are emotional geographies or affective geographies, right? And I don’t think we think about them very much. I mean, I call it atmosphere. I’d be just as happy calling the emotional geographies, which is another term in the literature. I mean a term that’s being used and how those permeate one another and articulate and come together. And then you say to me, well, what seven, what does that have to do with sustainability? Well, it does these things all inter penetrate one another, you know, a garden planting trees, ecological environment creates a kind of care and a kind of desire to care for one another as well as care for the environment itself.

Setha Low (17m 41s):
They’re not all separate.

Jeff Wood (17m 42s):
I’ve had Chuck Wolf on a couple of times to talk about some of his books and you know, one of the things he thinks about is a good

Setha Low (17m 49s):
Colleague from Sweden. We were all involved through the Swedish future places, so I didn’t know you knew

Jeff Wood (17m 54s):
Him. Yeah, yeah. Wonderful. And his books are, are wonderful and, and some of the things that I find really fascinating about them specifically is that emotional memory that he talks about when you’re at a place and you can remember conversation that happened there. And for me, I I just always go to this example, but when I used to drive home to Houston from the University of Texas at Austin, there was a street that I’d turned down and when I turned, I turned on a specific album in my car. And so now I can play that album and I can see where I’m driving, which is a windy road through pastures and cows and neighborhoods and, and small towns and places like that blue bonnets. I can just, you know, you can connect something whether it’s music or a place or feeling with a specific geography.

Jeff Wood (18m 38s):
And I think that that’s really huge for thinking about public spaces because of this kind of emotional connection that we have. You mentioned earlier, you know, people feeling connected to America through seeing everybody else in places like Jones Beach, they’re like, oh, I’m, I’m an American now, I came to a beach with everybody else. And it feels special. And I imagine that for the rest of their lives coming back to maybe standing at a certain point of the beach, they can remember that feeling of, you know, when they realized that they felt that way. And I find that just really comforting. I don’t know if there’s any question I have about it, but I found a lot of your book was kind of in the similar vein of comfort.

Setha Low (19m 14s):
I mean, it’s funny that I found you this way. I mean, I’m going off script. You and I are really similar. There’s a lot what you just said. I often play certain music when I’m in certain geography so that I can recall the geography through the music. I have a piece of music that takes me to Nicaragua during the earthquake. I also have drives. I do, and I wrote about it n a number of years ago. It’s a little bit in this book that when I drive Wilshire Boulevard in LA that my entire geography, my entire childhood is inscribed along the way. And it gets me to think about places like Society Hill or in Philadelphia or independence where African American district or race, I mean, what it brings me to is also thinking about people who had attachments to places and that those places, and they’re often public spaces are a race or their attachment is broken in some very often profit driven way.

Setha Low (20m 14s):
I mean, I, you know, but some way that really didn’t ever it anybody ever really cared about this place. And I think in my very earliest interest in this is if you want to maintain a group of people or a culture maintaining the place, and now what you’re adding is so important. The music all matters. And if we want to keep the complexity, the geographic complexity, the emotional complexity, the social complexity that I’m most interested in, the societal ability to make things, may I say better, you know, less polarized in these times, I think place music, the kind of attachment you’re talking about is critical.

Setha Low (20m 56s):
And we don’t talk about it very often. I was thinking, you’re the first person I’ve ever heard. Tell me that I do exactly the same thing. I just, it really warms, I, I can see maybe why you left the book

Jeff Wood (21m 10s):
Very connected,

Setha Low (21m 11s):
Very connected, very connected, real sensibility. But I’m trying, and I hope that comes through of saying it’s not just a personal thing. That these public spaces are good for many, many, many, many parts of society to have a flourishing society, be it sustainability or in places to work, or informal sector or play or recreation or social justice. That it’s not just you and I tracing our histories or being able to remember through a song or music or landscape, but that, that becomes a larger project, if that makes sense.

Setha Low (21m 53s):
A national project, a project that we all can share.

Jeff Wood (21m 57s):
Yeah, I mean, in the book you talk about the Statue of Liberty, right? And the histories of that place. And it doesn’t start with the Statue of Liberty. It starts many, many centuries before. And so kind of bringing together all those histories together and, and telling one story and acknowledging the people that came before, I think is an important point too.

Setha Low (22m 17s):
I think that’s really critical. And ultimately, if we wanna talk about public space and social justice, it’s gonna be in those histories and meanings and acceptance and respecting that many people are responding to places in many, many different ways. And yet sharing it all together, yet it’s a metaphor, but it’s also real. It’s material. It is not just metaphor. It really happens. And when you go to a concert or you go to Yankee game and you do all come together there, that does change things. These, these moments are not, I don’t think are so trivial. I think they’re the basis on which, again, back to your scaler model, these geographies of relationship, are you aware that a, a lot of, I know my students write about un geographic places, places that are made that are sort of seen as not part of the geography.

Setha Low (23m 10s):
And that’s been very interesting recently, people writing about people’s whose who can’t claim a geography and sort of the reverse of what we’re talking about. But that to me is also on the other side of claiming geography and understanding its meanings and feelings, is also to think about people who cannot claim a geography or even are seen as un geographic. By that I mean not having a place

Jeff Wood (23m 37s):
That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. Is there an example of something? Well, I’m

Setha Low (23m 41s):
Trying to think of what the best, I mean, the person I was talking to the other day was talking about women in Arctic cities and that we often think of the Arctic not as a place, as a geography. And she has all this evidence that a lot of McKitrick work on black geographies is the un geographic nature of African American life as it was imagined, rather. And that part of the current movement is to in place and claim geographies as black geographies that are meaningful gypsies, I mean, who are seen as just some un geographic and, and yet have very, very rich geographies that are not perceived.

Setha Low (24m 28s):
And then the very simple idea that I write about in which people’s histories are torn down as if somehow whether they live there or not, those histories aren’t important and those geographies aren’t kind of theirs. And we have that a lot in New York, right? I mean lower East side, is it Chinese or Latino or how much? And all of those being where the claiming of a geography, the geography of, of relationship is not clear or is denied

Jeff Wood (24m 59s):
And change over time. I mean, it’s interesting in, in the neighborhood that I’m in and places nearby as a lot of my family members from long past lived here, and they were Italian Irish, but now much of the neighborhood of say like the mission is seen as a Latino, right? So it, you know, changes over time, those kind of geographies and, and what people associate with them. It’s really fascinating.

Setha Low (25m 20s):
Yeah. And then the big question is, you know, whose geography does it become? I mean, the mission has become pretty much the central Americans say geography, but what happens to those earlier memories? And I’ve tried to talk about how are we gonna do that and you know, the, the sort of monumentalizing the symbolic components of place, I think, you know, going back to what you were saying about statute of liberty, but all our issues with monuments and claiming whose histories are pounded and whose histories are recorded and whose histories stay embedded in a place.

Jeff Wood (25m 56s):
Yeah. And there’s so many remnants too, right? Like, so there was a ravioli pasta place nearby called Luca that just recently closed that was very Italian and where family members used to go to get their crusta to roll out the ravioli, but it’s gone now. All there is is a sign painted on the side of a building, you know, things that disappear over time are painted over, they’re covered over. You can see glimpses when you tear things down. But that’s, that, that feels like a, a part of the historical geography too, is like how places evolve. I mean, San Francisco at some point, you know, the only folks were here that were Native American. And so, you know, places grow change over time. The diaspora happens, people go to the suburbs, et cetera. It’s just a whole, that’s a whole other, it feels like a whole other conversation even.

Jeff Wood (26m 39s):
And it’s of interest as well. But I do wanna talk about history. I mean like some of the things that you talk about in terms of history go back as far as like 11,000 BC I mean this history is long ranging and I’m wondering, you know, what we can take away now from the history of public space to think about, you know, our present situation.

Setha Low (26m 58s):
There have always been open spaces and they were public in some sense of that. What’s really great is that we have a lot more archeology places in East Africa, in South Africa, in Central America. I’ve worked on plaza work throughout that really demonstrate, it’s actually, I think as far back, what is, I think it’s 15,000 years, I think there was the very first space that which was surrounded by houses and used in different ways. So what does it mean? It means that human beings have always had spaces where they came together and where they mixed. And some were very utilitarian, some were ritual, some were places of work, some were places to grow food.

Setha Low (27m 39s):
All the same issues that we are looking at in why public space matters are already embedded in the new knowledge we have about the past. And so human settlements and human people have always had spaces to come together, sometimes for conflict, often for, you know, ballgame or fighting by ballgame, I mean like Taino ballgame, middle American ballgames, which were about power and strategy. But as far back as we can look, it’s not just recent history that we’re, we’re used to using. But as far back as we can look at the archeological record, there has been, there has been public space and it has been a place where people came together again, just as you say by scale, some being very small for a neighborhood, others becoming much larger in ritual, some organizing cities.

Setha Low (28m 32s):
And so it’s not surprising that at the end I think I come back after doing all this work and saying that I think all cities should be organized around public space. And that if that became, because it gives so much to so many, as I said, from the environment all the way to social justice, from work to play, all of that if we were organizing our cities around public space. And that was given priority in terms of network and relationships. And in some ways transportation does do that. We have a network of transportation and streets are public and, and suds are public. And many cultures, I right a lot about India in the book, you know, they’re, they’re totally public.

Setha Low (29m 16s):
People live and do everything in the streets. But if we, we wanna look to the future and be more conscious of how much we’re getting from our public space, I think we might think a little harder about the choices we’re being made, put more money towards the public sector and think about planning and designing around it as opposed to seeing it as an add-on after the buildings have already gone in.

Jeff Wood (29m 41s):
We have this amazing amount of public space that I feel like a lot of folks don’t talk about. There’s 30% usually in cities of the ground cover is, is streets and roads and sidewalks and, right. That’s a huge amount of space. And I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately in the era of this housing shortage about informal settlement and what it can teach us about the evolution of, of our thinking related to housing people. But also, you know, in the book you mentioned informal workers and jobs that use public space like streets and sidewalks and things like that. And I imagine that that has some lessons for us too about how we can rethink these spaces that are seen as the domain of cars mostly, but seeing how people actually use them versus maybe how some people wish they were used

Setha Low (30m 21s):
For sure. What did I say? 60% of people in the world are in the informal sector and of that 60% sometimes as high as 80, most of those people are working in public space, be it a sidewalk or a street or a park or a plaza or outside a library. That’s where most people work in the world. In the US people say, well it’s not so prevalent in the us but right after the epidemic, during the heart of it, I think something like 27% of people in the United States were actually working in the informal sector. You know, that would be 2020. Where’s their workplace? Their workplace or the, the nannies in the park, the caregivers on benches and the sidewalks, vendors, you know, in the street, on and on and on.

Setha Low (31m 8s):
I, and I think we just don’t think about the public spaces a workplace. And if we could attend to it in a more productive way and take models from the rest of the world, on the other hand then, you know, I, I can already hear everybody who has a car say, well, where am I gonna park? You know? So there is a real struggle now I think we’re in a period of time where we are questioning how we want our streets used. Covid really, you know, closed off a lot of streets and now cars want them back and neighborhoods at least here in New York are fighting to keep those streets closed. And it’s up for grabs right now, which way it’s gonna go. I don’t know what happened.

Setha Low (31m 48s):
San Francisco, did you close a lot of roads in San Francisco?

Jeff Wood (31m 51s):
Yeah, we did. We closed a number and we just actually had a vote to keep a number of them closed. But I closed is kind of a weird way to, to put it because the, the streets are still open to cars. They’re just not through streets. Like they have, you know, oh barriers that will allow, you know, trucks to deliver whatever they need to do or people to go to their driveways or things like that. It does feel safer, but then there’s still a struggle over whether people want the roads to be completely open to cars and close to people, right? So I think that that’s kind of the main distinction is like there’s a lot of streets that got changed into, you know, safe streets, open streets, I can’t remember what the name of the term is right now, but you know, it’s, it’s whether it’s open for cars or open for people is kind of the distinction.

Jeff Wood (32m 32s):
So, you know, we didn’t have any closures per se, but they’re closed, quote unquote. I’m doing air quotes here with my fingers.

Setha Low (32m 38s):
Yeah, I mean here I, a lot of neighborhoods really enjoyed having their streets available for kids to play. I mean literally kids to play. Yeah, I could imagine them if they were left that way. Digging them up and putting in gardens and trees and greening. Cause New York, as much parkland as we have, it’s not everywhere as you know, there are parts of New York and parts of all large cities that are, you know, it’s really hot and full of cement and asphalt digging up the asphalt. But there is a lot of pushback about, you know, commerce and can we have a viable city? I think we need new models and new ways of thinking about it.

Setha Low (33m 18s):
And as I said, my start would be to think about the public space first. Think about that as a network, including the streets that were for people, including streets that were partially for people and you know, but to start there at that and then begin to ask more provocative questions. And of course we need to experiment. We need to begin to experiment. Is there no other way than totally pedestrian or totally car? I mean we’ve tried with bike lanes here in New York and I hear everyone complain about, you know, nobody’s happy with any of these solutions, but there are places like Copenhagen who seem to have come up with solutions that are quite green and really point the way to the future.

Setha Low (33m 58s):
It’s an unusual place. It’s a very tiny country. It doesn’t face, I mean I always wanna caveat that, you know, it doesn’t face the kinds of issues we, we face here in the United States. It doesn’t face the kinds of diversity and income inequality and just an entirely different political system in terms of what the social contract is. But nonetheless it can be done. And I think that’s what we still need to be thinking about in our own American way. I guess

Jeff Wood (34m 28s):
I love the story from the Netherlands about how in the seventies, because of the oil crisis, they had to rethink basically how they did things. And I imagine Denmark was similar and they went one way and we went the other way. And I always think about it cuz they were going the same direction as we were. They had the cars, they had the right, you know, the roads that were cutting through cities and things like that, but they just chose a different way and I feel like they’re almost better off for it later on because of the energy crisis that continues. Yeah, and climate change and all those things.

Setha Low (34m 55s):
Well they’re set up, but of course again, there was a decision in that, in those societies that people came first. I mean there is, there is a sense of, and I don’t know if we’ve made up our mind, do you think we’ve made up our mind here or who comes? You know, what are the major values?

Jeff Wood (35m 15s):
I think many people have made up their minds, but they are on different sides. Yeah. And in

Setha Low (35m 20s):
The US it’s certainly not Europe and in Latin. I think Latin America may offer us other options, other ways of thinking because it’s somewhere in between cities like Bogota. There are a lot of cities that have spent a lot of time linking up all their public spaces and really trying to use that as a strategy to integrate the city and to bring more social goods to neighborhoods. I mean there are lots of things, poor neighborhoods need of course, housing and schools, et cetera, et cetera. Much of it requires huge amounts of infrastructure. But public space is something we could really be offering everyone we really could. It’s affordable in that sense.

Setha Low (36m 0s):
And because it produces so many different byproducts that are so positive that create a kind of a societal flourishing, both individually and at the city and national level, I don’t see, I think we should be, as I said, giving it higher priority and starting there.

Jeff Wood (36m 22s):
You mentioned something that I agree on in terms of trying to rethink spaces and often Sanchez Street, which is our slow street here, that’s closest to me. I often think about what we could do if we could just put grass down on the pavement, right? Like if we just plant trees on the pavement and just make it into this, this linear park. And you know, I feel like a lot of people think about environmental stewardship and they think about, oh let’s just plant a tree or let’s just put down grass and be done with it. But what should we be looking at in terms of thinking about like the environmental impacts of public spaces or the greening of public spaces? Because it’s not just plant a tree and it’s not just put some grass down. There’s a whole other set of issues that go along with that.

Setha Low (36m 59s):
Well, one of the things I try to address in the chapter on sustainability is that the concept of sustainability has been sort of hijacked. I at least in writing the book, really feel that measuring EcoServices ecological services impact in a city of different things we can do is not a bad metric to start with. By the way, I came away from the book feeling like planting trees was actually more important than I realized. So I, my bias against the, the trees were going to do it, but we do need to be thinking about ecosystems and we know that, and we have some great leaders now talking about restoring ecosystems and imagining ecosystems that include human beings that include the water and include the plants and animals.

Setha Low (37m 51s):
So again, back to if a public space system could be imagined as an ecological system rather than just planting trees. I agree with you. And putting down grass, which believe it or not, it still would make a difference. I mean that was the thing I didn’t know. I actually didn’t know that I’m, I hadn’t really realized how, how, what a difference could make. But what would make even more of a difference is to create an integrated ecological system of the city that as far back as what, 40 years ago, Ian Mac and Spur talked about the granite garden. I mean there are ecological processes that work in the city all the time. And if we became, again this many years later, really put that into practice, I think we would have a more sophisticated idea of what we mean by ecology.

Setha Low (38m 39s):
We now have sustainable parks, a whole category of them like that Galen Krantz has been studying, but she walks away from those studies saying it’s just for show. And there are a number of parks that have really tried to improve EcoServices, lessen pollution, water runoff, more trees, et cetera, et cetera. But again, as one lone site, not having tremendous amount of impact and also having to also be constrained by the codes of the city. I mean the way in which you can build something. So I think the real answer to your question, I’m not really your major.

Setha Low (39m 23s):
I don’t know exactly how to really create the kinds of ecosystems we want, but I, I think one, we have to realize humans are part of it and that we’re living in the scene, but that we need to think at a level of complexity and stop ignoring the science about what makes a difference and what doesn’t. And there’s a lot of knowledge out there in the chapter on sustainability I really try to put in that tells us about what we could be doing to create much more ecologically rich and flourishing environments.

Jeff Wood (39m 57s):
You’ve been writing a lot about public space and I feel like you’ve probably gone through the paces of every kind of idea or many ideas in the genre, if I’m gonna use that word. But, you know, writing this book, was there something that surprised you that you hadn’t thought about before, that you hadn’t considered that maybe putting this together brought out?

Setha Low (40m 18s):
Well one, I’ve already mentioned that urban planning still doesn’t start with public space. And that if we did it could really transform the world. We really made a difference. I had not really, number two, the thing about those planting those trees, I actually was less aware than I should have been of the impact that public space can have on the health and wellbeing, the ecological diversity, everything in the city, what impact parks really have and to advocate a whole lot more for them. But the biggest thing overall for me is that I just didn’t have any idea until I wrote the whole book together, how really valuable public space is.

Setha Low (41m 8s):
I know that sounds really funny, but I had no idea of the breadth of its impact on every dimension of life and what a difference it makes to human flourishing. And that, of course Covid really accentuated that. Cuz when we lost it, it was just so obvious. I didn’t, didn’t think I needed to explain it. But if we really understood that from environment to loneliness or mental health, or from having a place to work, to having a place to socialize and learn to be a kid, that there isn’t anything else that’s necessarily more important.

Setha Low (41m 53s):
You could argue with me food I, you know, but that it’s incredibly important because of the richness of its contribution. And at the same time, we don’t value it. We take it for granted. And that whether it is privatization in large cities in which there aren’t public funds to create new public spaces or to maintain the ones we have, or whether it’s the global south, where cities are growing so rapidly that there’s not time or place for public space at all, and that huge communities are being developed without them. Or that what percent of the world live in informal housing, where often public space is not the centerpiece of people’s organizing when they’re struggling to make a living.

Setha Low (42m 40s):
And yet we could look at places like Dandora Nairobi, or places large informal settlements where there are public spaces and what a difference they made. So the biggest surprise was for me is that we so ignore it. And if I sit at a dinner table with someone and I say, really, we should be, you know, really thinking more seriously about ecological parks in the Bronx. And somebody said, well, you know, why, why? Why would I care the why question? So that’s what I walked away with. The why is it, it’s transformative. And other people have said pieces of it, but I tried to put it all together.

Setha Low (43m 21s):
That’s all I tried to do.

Jeff Wood (43m 23s):
I just thought about this, you know, humans are social animals and public spaces allow us to do what our biology requires through evolution. And I think that that kinda encompasses some of that. Do you have any favorite public spaces?

Setha Low (43m 36s):
Oh, everyone always wants to ask me that. I happen to love beaches, as you can probably tell from the book. I talk a lot. I grew up on a beach. I grew up in LA and that’s probably my favorite public space. Partially because when people go there, it’s so different and so marginal and exposes you, I guess, your body or what you look like, you know? And then the joy of the water and the rich history of beaches and the ecology of the beaches and the, the power and an understanding of the ocean. That’s probably my favorite. And in terms of parks, I’ve worked in so many, probably my favorite is Prospect Park near where I live in Brooklyn.

Setha Low (44m 19s):
Awesome. You know, snowing down the street, prospect Park is one of those places that accommodates everybody, but of course it’s big, but it’s got room for everyone and activities for everyone, and that allows people to come together in ways that are really rich and rewarding.

Jeff Wood (44m 37s):
Awesome. Well, the book is Why Public Space Matters by Seth. Hello. Where can folks find it? If they wanna get a copy?

Setha Low (44m 44s):
Oxford University Press Amazon and your local bookstore.

Jeff Wood (44m 48s):
Awesome. Well, Seth, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Setha Low (44m 51s):
Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.