Most of the resources put into Australian cities over the past few decades have been to provide quality private homes and substantial space for private vehicles. Private space is important, people need a space in which to express themselves.
However people are not just motivated by private needs. People are also social animals with a desire for the common good. When a city becomes so oriented to the needs and motivations for private space that it loses sight of the needs and motivations for public space then it begins to fragment and lose its way.
It is our contention that Australian cities in the past 30 years have lost their orientation towards the public realm. To win back the city we need to generate a new vision of the benefits that flow from good public space.
Public spaces are the streets, squares and malls where people meet; the safer and more attractive they are the easier it is for community to develop. Public spaces are the parks, rivers and beaches and the air we breathe; such features are fundamental to our urban lives and to look after them is central to the good city. To a large extent the whole vibrancy and viability of a city is defined by its attitude to the public realm.
A key characteristic of good public spaces is hope. Hope is where the interactions of a community give a subtle reassurance of a continuing experience of a good city life into the future. Hope is expressed in the streetscapes, as well as in the streetlife, in the public buildings as well as in the public processes for resolving problems, in the local natural features and in the management process that maintains them, in the attactive public transport and in the public attitudes of those who use it and look after it.
Cities can lose hope, they can lose the fight for public space and encourage people just to retreat to their private spaces. They can lose hope because it is not fought hard enough for. They can lose it by being part of an anti-city fashion or a trend that suggests looking after the private world in cities is sufficient.
Much of the past hundred years in the English-speaking world has seen a turning away from public space in cities. It has been an anti-city period, probably due to the rapid rise of the smoky industrial city and the flight of the wealthy to the countryside and urban periphery. English poetry and novels like those from Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, made cities seem evil and the countryside pure. Australian writers such as Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson followed the same tradition. The closer to the bush we lived, the better people we would be.
This same anti-city bias is not apparent in the European tradition where public space is much more appreciated, where there is a long history that encouraged life in the centre of the city not its periphery, where closer living was accepted because you were then near public urban facilities.
It is not hard to see why the English urban tradition when exported to Australia and the US created cities with less emphasis on the public side of the city and more on the private side. The invention of the automobile, telephone and other technologies which facilitate the private spaces in a city were eagerly and rapidly adopted in such cities.
However, even where there has been an anti-city tradition there is nothing which says that it must continue. Even in England there has been a small pro-urban tradition in the big cities and Australian cities are now highly multi-cultural with many people who rejoice in living in a city. Fremantle's revitalisation was given its major drive by the substantial Italian community who live and work there. Likewise with much of the inner city in Melbourne and Sydney. A strong commitment to public space can easily generate support and momentum in any Australian city. The privatisation of space
Working against this reversal is the belief by some economists in the Thatcher and Reagan tradition, that the only reality worth facilitating is private space. Thus resources are taken from public transport and given to private transport, taken from heritage projects and housing in accessible locations and given to subsidising urban sprawl for private residences. It is not hard to see why cities in England and the USA deteriorated so markedly under Thatcher and Reagan. European cities have not allowed such ideology to ruin their public realms.
In our global cities study between 1960 and 1980, Toronto has shown a significant reversal of the trend to dispersal and motorisation. The effect of its increased density and improved transit system has been an obviously more attractive set of public spaces in the city. At the same time the nearby city of Detroit has deteriorated markedly on all counts under falling densities and total capitulation to private transport. These two cities show how in a 20 to 30 year framework a city can either move towards a public space orientation or a private space orientation. Fortunately we have enough examples to show it is possible to 'win back' a city.
Each of the policy areas suggested as the basis for overcoming the problems of the car-based city have strong elements of public space and depend on the public to value this.
Public spaces need public-oriented people. Trends in our cities to provide predominantly for private spaces have contributed to the decline in people's abilities to be public minded. Can we turn this around? Can car-based private space-oriented city dwellers learn the ancient virtues of citizenship and care for public spaces? This is our moral and spiritual challenge as well as the technical challenge of re-orienting our transport and land use patterns. If we cant then our cities will continue to deteriorate and we will lose most of the features we value in urban life.
The future of our cities will be determined by how we find a balance between the desire and need for private space and the desire and need for public space. All cities face the awkward trade-offs between facilitating sprawl or facilitating redevelopment, between facilitating private or public transport, between servicing the insatiable demands of private space or the intangible elements of public spaces.
Fundamental to the whole process of city planning is a realisation and recognition of the importance of public space. This is the precursor to the process of winning back the city.
"Integral to the spirit of the good city is its public and social life, its zest and gaiety and the capacity for intermingling ...It should be a place of exuberance and exaltation of the human spirit, a place for celebration and public 'happenings', for rich and easy encounter, for relaxation and enjoyment. It must not be simply functional and utilitarian." - E.R. Wickham, The Urban Harvest, 1977
