The Emperor Has No Clothes and Our Public Realm Has No Program

You know how it feels to walk into a public space that is just…dull. Or worse, dangerous. Everyone’s experienced this, even if they can’t articulate the exact reason why, but we know when we’ve entered an area we don’t want to hang out in. Maybe it’s barren and ugly, or maybe it feels unsafe, or maybe there’s simply nothing to do there except pass through.

Coauthor Shina Shayesteh referred to this once as the “liminal spaces” effect, or the “creepy hallway” effect of the North American built environment. In a house, you hang out in rooms that are comfortable, decorated, and clearly designed in a way to accommodate people staying and accomplishing specific tasks there. Hallways, on the other hand, are (usually) empty spaces that you pass through. You don’t feel comfortable hanging out there, and they’re not (usually) designed for you to linger or be entertained in them, even if you tried. Most of our public spaces get the hallway treatment, though often wrapped in evocative language by the designers that these spaces are, in fact, “good.”

The emperor has no clothes. Our public realm has no program. It has so little to do and so few places that are truly comfortable and allow us to be at ease.

You feel this the most when traveling outside of the United States. Cities in older parts of the world feature public spaces that are alive and visibly well trafficked: they’ve got the equivalent of the cozy living room that everyone automatically gathers in, without having to think twice about it.

Why? Is it some sort of cultural difference that caused the rest of the world to build living rooms, and the U.S. to build a house full of hallways?

Of course not. Public spaces don’t fail because our culture favors empty, boring places, and we don’t have a lack of communities that care, either. The problem lies in the fact that we’ve unwittingly created a system that makes it difficult (if not sometimes impossible) to improve spaces over time, and that, inevitably, causes them to fail.

The good news is, we can fix this problem and learn to better evaluate what makes for good design in public spaces, which is what this new series of articles is going to be all about. Let’s start by digging deeper into the root of the problem.

Today, we typically build (or reshape) public spaces in a single, high-stakes moment. Every decision in regards to considerations like layout, materials, amenities, circulation, equipment, and programming gets decided in one furious six-month sprint. Then there’s 12–18 months of construction. Finally, a ribbon cutting. And then, for the next 10, 20, sometimes 30 years, the space is largely treated as finished.

This is, frankly, an absurd way of doing things. No place is locked in amber, and the fact that we treat the built environment as something that’s not going to need to change or adapt over time sets us up for failure.

The saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day” exists for a reason: the best places in the world didn’t emerge fully formed from the ether. They evolved incrementally over time, responding to how people actually used them. Someone noticed people lingering here instead of there. A shortcut became a path. A bench got moved into the shade. A market appeared, then expanded, then became permanent. But we’ve engineered these types of quick feedback loops out of the system, and when you remove the ability to adjust incrementally, you put enormous pressure on the design phase to “get it right” in a single shot, even though no one can predict what the future holds for any given space. We’ve called this “the great ribbon-cutting divide.”

But don’t we have the computer-aided design (CAD) technology to project what things will be like into the future!?!?

One of the hallmarks of the design phase is the creation of a rendering. It’s also ground zero for a lot of future problems in a site.

Design reviews can often only focus on objects, since it’s the only lever architects have. Even their clients, developers or capital project managers, hardly get involved, if at all, in the operations of a space once it’s built.

On top of that, there’s a gulf between the experience of a designer working on their computer to create simple geometric shapes for paths, greenery, and other features of a site versus what people actually experience on the ground. A bird’s-eye aerial view of a 90-degree path (surrounded by elegant squares, circles, and patterns) might look pretty on paper, but it’s not going to feel so fun in reality when you’re walking outside on a sweltering summer day, thinking about how it would be a lot faster to just cut through the grass.

The more preschool-era shapes you see in the site plan, the more illogical it will feel and function. Spaces are experienced on foot, not from above.

The logic of use-driven spaces lead to curved desire lines, obtuse (rather than 90-degree) turn angles, and square(ish) spaces with round(ish) corners.

This is why so many brand-new spaces feel oddly empty and soulless despite being “well designed.” A place isn’t experienced as a collection of objects, but as a network of sequenced moments. Can I get comfortable here? Is there something to do here (now, not someday)? Can I meet a friend, watch my kid, get a coffee, use the bathroom, or stay a little longer than I planned?

So just because a rendering shows blissful illustrated people in it, doesn’t mean they’ll actually show up. Activity can’t be forced, it has to be earned. Which brings us to the question: why would anyone come to this new place?

One of the most common traps by designers and planners is mistaking features for outcomes.

Just because you installed a bench doesn’t make it comfortable to sit on. A new feature won’t automatically generate activity. An open, empty lawn isn’t going to sprout things for people to do, apropos of nothing else around it.

The real question is always experiential: What can someone actually do here, and how often would they want to do it?

Daily experiences matter more than occasional ones. A space that supports small, everyday, repeatable actions, such as sitting comfortably, meeting someone, enjoying food or drinks, or passing the time with games, will almost always outperform a space designed around rare marquee events.

This shift, from objects to experiences, is subtle but profound. And once you start seeing spaces this way, it becomes hard not to notice how often we get it backward. The next step is to start to see what could be done about it.

The pivot from objects to experiences opens us up to the possibility that spaces could be better than they are today. Seeing that those experiences are shaped not only by physical objects but human actions like ongoing care, enterprise and friendly interchanges unveils that places can get better not only (or usually) through massive capital events, but incremental improvements.

We can transcend the binaries of good or bad, successful or failed toward always getting better.

Once we sense what’s a problem, the next steps are to figure out how to name it. Then what to do about it. Finally, to translate one’s past experiences into the future when you’re forced into the modern world’s typical six-month vice grip of a design process.

This series is about building that skill.

Not how to complain about spaces (which anyone can do), but how to evaluate them and make them better. Not how to design from scratch, but how to understand what makes places come alive.

In the next article, we’ll walk through how to evaluate an existing space simply by spending time in it: what to notice, what questions to ask yourself, and how to move from vague dissatisfaction to specific insight and recommendations.

After that, we’ll look at how to evaluate plans and designs before they’re built (if you are a client or community member forced into the usual modern one-shot sprint process) and how to give better feedback that focuses on lived experience, not just form.

So keep an eye out for the next installment in this series, because we’re excited to share our vision for a better way forward with you. Public spaces are vital to the health of our communities, and too many of them have been flatlining for too long. Let’s get to work on resuscitation. Subscribe below to get notified when part two is out!