Public spaces could better meet community needs: survey

Cities have made significant progress improving their public spaces, according to the Project for Public Spaces’ recently published State of Public Space Survey. But public space professionals believe there is still “a lot of work to be done,” said its co-executive director, Nate Storring.

The results also reaffirmed some of the researchers’ and practitioners’ core beliefs about public space. Firstly, the diversity of respondents and responses demonstrates the potential of public spaces to act as multi-solvers. As the costs of healthcare, disaster relief, and the justice system climb ever upward, study after study has found that we could be saving millions of dollars by addressing many of the root causes of these problems at the crossroads where they come together—in the public realm. Instead, we spend millions more downstream, inefficiently and ineffectively trying to solve these problems one by one.

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