Design of public space has a significant bearing on quality of life

ONE piece of advice a life coach might offer is that we have less to fear if we find ways to take control. Fear of the future and fear of change is often related to anxiety about not being able to manage aspects of our lives, and yet often we can exercise more control than we realise. I’m not a coach, but it seems to me that a lot of the strategies offered are about figuring out what you have control over, and working on that.

Part of it is practical, like identifying steps that can take you towards some goal, and another part is identifying the goal in the first place. Turning dreams into reality. This applies to public life too. We can make our dreams visible in the creation of wonderful places all over the city, if we dare, but there are fears holding us back.

When urban designers plan public spaces they might add whimsical sculptures and other forms of public art, but this is just icing on the cake. The real question is: “What kind of cake is it?” Without the icing, does it make you feel good and is it healthy?

There are pieces of outdoor furniture, like the Rock Girl benches on St George’s Mall and elsewhere, which are both functional and culturally expressive.

Why not extend that idea to elements of the square that aren’t usually considered as open for interpretation?

I don’t mean turning every lamppost, bicycle rack or paved surface into a work of art – as fun as that might be. I mean choosing, arranging and designing everything in a public space to positively influence the culture of our public lives. All the ingredients of the cake together determine whether the result is something we really want. And if designers fail to meet our anticipation of that first, mouth-watering bite, we will be afraid to try it again. And so we have abandoned public spaces littered across the city.

If asked, most of us would express our desires for the city in terms that we think are practical. We might not realise how expensive our ideas are, or how out of touch with politics or institutional constraints or other barriers, but we imagine that they conform to what the professionals can actually implement. And that self-imposed censorship, the fear of exploring wild ideas, is what prevents us from creating something really exciting and adventurous in the public realm.

As I’ve written before, the City of Cape Town’s co-design workshops last year were a start at exploring ways of overcoming this limitation in expressing our hopes for what the city, as a place, can do for us. Part of their power was in getting residents to express their dreams. The other part was in playing with physical objects on a model of their neighbourhoods. It was serious planning, but it was ambitious because it used a playful process to overcome a fear of getting involved.

We should take that to the next level. People take control of their public lives when the state fails them. They create alternative forms of service and governance that might or might not interact with formal structures set up by government. Mob justice, gangs, illegal electricity connections, street committees and neighbourhood watches are examples. But when public spaces don’t work we usually just accept it or, at best, fight the symptoms and not the causes.

One reason is that we don’t see the potential that public space can provide. Public space is a government service, just like sanitation, education and health care. But most of us have no idea how it can enhance our lives, because it so often fails to give expression to our dreams about how we want to live our lives. If it’s threatening, we want to shut it down or cut it off from our lives, and don’t bother considering innovative steps to improve it.

But there is a growing worldwide recognition that the design of public space has a significant bearing on the quality of urban life and the ability to attract positive forms of activity, and this is not just related to public squares in the CBD. Every street, park and river has a role to play if we allow ourselves to imagine it.

Every neighbourhood has its dreams and priorities that need to be made visible for everyone to see and be inspired by. We can’t put up our own lamp-posts, but we can reimagine what a lamp-post could do and find creative ways to achieve that goal.

@carbonsmart