PERSPECTIVES 01: Constructing the American Public Realm

The research project “Constructing the American Public Realm” (CAPR), initiated by Christopher Marcinkoski at the McHarg Center and in ongoing collaboration with the team at PORT Urbanism, examines how public space is conceived, funded, built, and administrated across nine American cities. CAPR focuses on capital structures and governance models, creating a framework to compare municipal strategies on creating and operating public space, revealing idiosyncrasies in how these processes and investments are deployed. This research led to the creation of a 64-card Public Space Funding Primer—a tool designed to distill complex funding models, governance structures, and investment mechanisms into an accessible format so that people can better understand how public space is made and managed. The cards allow designers, policymakers, and community members to ask “How did other cities get these projects done? How are they paying for this work and structuring projects for long-term success?” CAPR aims to better support advocacy and informed decision-making around the public realm, both in and beyond the design profession.

CAPR has been made publicly accessible through PORT’s design practice and has been presented to professional associations that focus on the built environment and public realm including the National Mayors’ Institute on City Design, the National Recreation and Park Association, the American Institute of Architects, and the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Christopher Marcinkoski sat down with his research assistant and PORT collaborator Lillia Schmidt (MLA ‘25) to discuss this ongoing work.

Lillia Schmidt  Hey Chris! You often talk about how landscape architects should be advocates for public space. Can you speak more about our role as advocates?

Christopher Marcinkoski  Hi Lillia! The relationship between the discipline of landscape architecture and the making of public space is, to me, a surprisingly complicated one. I’m an architect who came to landscape architecture by way of a fascination with cities and urbanism. Specifically, the discovery of public realm as a space of inquiry and practice was profound for me because it opened up the possibilities of a powerful medium within which to think about the way that we shape our cities.

But I find that the consideration of public space within landscape architecture has been largely ignored as an intellectual concern - whether intentional or not - in the interest of larger cartographic or planetary scales on one end of the spectrum and more decorative concerns on the other. So, one of the things that struck me early on in this research is that when we started looking at the academic readers and other compendiums that critically consider urban public space, we realized that almost the entirety of the essays were written from the perspective of sociology, planning, and occasionally, anthropology. There was very little, if any critical writing from the discipline of landscape architecture about public space in these collections.

That was weird to me. It made me ask “why is the discipline that, in theory, is designing and implementing these spaces, not writing and thinking critically about their making?” And if you're not thinking about them or writing about them, then how can you advocate for them? The answer is, you can’t. So, I felt like there was a gap in the discourse of the discipline that specifically focused on the role public space plays in shaping human interaction in our cities.

I was at a conference recently where the former Parks Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia was talking about how, during the pandemic, she felt there was going to be a great pivot in how we, as a society, value public space. She pointed out that suddenly during that time, the parks in Philadelphia were serving these essential social and civic purposes that people were finally recognizing. And she thought, “Maybe the pandemic has allowed us to finally see the value and importance of investing in public space.” But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Parks Department was the recipient of some of the deepest cuts proposed by the mayor as part of his budget the following year. She shared that she went into the bathroom and cried because she was like, “If a global pandemic where you can explicitly see the absolute essential value of public space doesn't shift the political prioritization of how we fund these spaces, what will?”

That story resonated with me. It reaffirmed the importance of the work that this research is trying to do, because public space is something that I believe we take for granted as a society and as a discipline: we assume that it’s easy to design, easy to implement and easy to maintain, that people will inevitably value it, and that it will always be there. But I would argue that at this political moment, we simply can't take essential civic infrastructures for granted because it's increasingly easy for them to disappear. There needs to be greater advocacy for maintaining and investing in high quality urban public space from within the discipline. And that’s really the motivation for this work.

LS  As the McHarg Center focuses on areas like climate policy and biodiversity, where does research on public space fit in? Why does the public realm merit equal focus, and how do you see these topics intersecting- in your work and in the field at large?

CM  The word I keep coming back to is people. Public space means space for people, right? It means the spaces of the built environment that are accessible and legible to a society. I believe that this physical and experiential tangibility is especially critical for the big shifts in behavior necessary to deal with things like climate change, biodiversity loss, the energy transition, and all these larger systemic concerns which are super critical and urgent.

From my perspective, the place that we are going to affect change is through human experience. Abstract policies or visualizations that are aesthetically beautiful but difficult to understand are not immediately legible to the lay public. So I don't know if they truly resonate in a way that shifts human behavior or perception. There's something about experience and memory, and the physical environment that profoundly impacts the way people think through things. We risk losing track of that power if we don't focus on those spaces where people are able to interact; the natural or constructed environments that relate to these larger concerns. I'm thinking about some of the writing of Tim Morton, who is talking about the aesthetic experience as a way of dealing with the climate crisis as opposed to fixating on data and factoids—the data dump as he calls it.

The aesthetic experience—and I’d include experiences in the built environment here—is one that is created through art, as well as visual and material culture, and oftentimes has a more long-lasting impact because it creates memories and emotions. I believe we need those kinds of human experiences woven into our everyday built environment to remind us of what is of importance and at stake. So, I think, public space has the potential to pull on all those threads and on all the other subjects of the McHarg Center and bring them together in a way that allows us to act on them in tangible, physical, meaningful ways.

LS  I love this idea that public spaces are the places where the built environment and society interact and make larger ideas tangible. Could you talk about the importance of creating these means to communicate beyond the bubble of our discipline?

CM  In a way, I feel like the work is looking to develop convening mechanisms as much as anything. I don't know if this research offers answers but rather aims to facilitate a conversation and bring people together around a subject area that deserves greater attention and scrutiny. And we're trying to find mechanisms for drawing that attention and creating that awareness, right? Some of this is about elevating the importance of public space within the design disciplines. But maybe more importantly, it's about elevating the consideration of public space within the broader society’s imagination.

The Constructing the American Public Realm cards—that you’ve been working on Lillia—attempt to do this. They’re case studies and comparative analyses. They try to take a whole bunch of information and distill and package it in an easily digestible way. The intent is not to offer an answer or solution, but to prompt curiosity. We don't think about the health of our parks as being directly related to the administrative structure of a mayoral administration. We don't think about how much of a role philanthropy plays in shaping the agenda of where we invest in public space. We don't think about how reliant we are in the American context on private real estate to provide public space for our communities in the absence of actual public funding. So the larger project is really trying to surface a set of concerns and a set of interests to facilitate dialogue and scrutiny around how public space in the United States is produced and operated.

LS  I'm curious, did you have any specific audience that you wanted to reach with the CAPR Cards, or thought were being left out of the conversation? What do you think exposure to this knowledge could help them achieve?

CM  I think there's a couple of different audiences. One is students of design and planning, but another is communities who are being confronted with the prospect of a new piece of public space or renovation of an existing one.

PORT does a lot of work in the Midwest, and one of most notable “public spaces” that's been undertaken recently in that context is MVVA’s  Gathering Place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s an amazing project that is, from a capital point of view, completely inaccessible for most communities in the American context. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of private dollars were put into this super-sized, hyper-programmed signature public space destination. So, we were working on a project in an adjacent state, and everybody said, “we want to have the Gathering Place! Can you do that?” But there was no connection between the scale of that investment—or the fact that it was privately funded—and the scale of what their own city was thinking about investing in. And so, there is a dissonance between projects that have complete philanthropic backing, versus projects that rely on a public funding source and what you're actually able to achieve. As a result, expectations get set or expectations get changed and people can be disappointed. I belive it’s valuable to understand how the recipe for funding a piece of public space in the United States is so complicated and so different from city-to-city and project-to-project.

If the public was more aware of how complicated it is to get a park or a playground or a pedestrian street paid for and built, let alone operated and maintained, there would be greater outcry. We have a pattern in the U.S. of underfunding things that are important—housing, transit, education, healthcare—and then we complain about why they don't work. It's this horrible cycle, and parks are just as susceptible as any other kind of essential urban resource. You’ll note I don't say amenities here in reference to public spaces. I say resources, because I fundamentally believe that high quality public space is essential for the health of our society.

LS  You're talking about cobbling together funds and resources, but also these large private and philanthropic investments that go into funding public spaces across the US. Can you talk about why this research is specific to the American context and how broader global funding mechanisms differ?

CM  The American political economy is one that has always favored individual sovereignty and private landowner rights over the collective good. So, from our country’s foundational identity, there has not been the same belief in the shared resource as in the individual accomplishment. That’s different than European countries where there's a greater focus and belief in the social support structure of society, right? In that context, it's more about the shared purpose and the shared health of a society. I know some people would say, “Well, your research is a little bit crass. It's just about the money.” But it's also about the policies and structures related to the money. It posits that in order to make these kinds of investments and create these kinds of spaces in cities, we need to fundamentally shift the way that we as a society think about them and value them.

LS  I'm interested in the disconnect between market-driven values often held by clients and the less tangible metrics used in landscape architecture. How can the profession attribute greater value to public space, and what challenges arise in defining these values?

CM  One metric I always struggle with is this correlation that if a piece of public space is crowded, it's successful, and if it's empty, it's not. I think that's an unfair way to measure the success of a space because in daily life, the pattern, activity, and use fluctuates. I think one category of evaluation that is often under-measured is the depth and range of memories, emotions, or experiences produced by a place. I would argue that those things are just as important and as valuable to try to capture as the amount of stormwater that a place processes, or the number of food trucks that it can hold, or the crowd that it draws on a Friday afternoon. Our conception of public space needs be more malleable; how we think about it, talk about it, and evaluate it as a kind of societal infrastructure that is essential to happines, quality of life, and flourishing.

LS  Quantifying the impact of green space through ecological metrics is a lot easier than measuring less tangible aspects, such as memory or experience. How might we approach measuring seemingly immeasurable things?

CM  What is the value of measuring? Why are we motivated to measure everything? We're told repeatedly that data is essential. The demand for measuring often appears when you're trying to pursue a grant for building or renovation, and you need to demonstrate why that money is important to be used here, or when you are looking for funding for programming for a temporary activity in public space. So, you need to be able to measure and to project what you think the return is going to be so that you can apply for that same funding the following year. What that implies to me is that we don't believe that public spaces are inherently valuable, right?

We must make a larger argument for why public spaces should exist and why we should fund them. In an ideal world we would be asked “Why shouldn't we fund them? Why shouldn't we provide these facilities for our neighborhoods and for our communities?” We know the benefits that these kinds of investments bring, and yet there is this sort of obligation to repeatedly make the business case for the piece of public space. I think having to repeatedly make the economic argument for public space implies that we as a society don't believe in its value.

LS  It's so hard to think about this, because obviously you and I see the inherent value in public space. But we do exist in a market driven economy, and metrics are so important to making this case. So, it's hard to even imagine a world in which it's different.

CM  It is. I would argue that our expectation level for public space in this country is absurdly low. Most Americans don’t expect more than the bare-bones minimum when it comes to urban public space, and then when they see and experience places where public spaces are given higher priority within the societal structure, it resonates. This question of awareness and expectation is a big challenge, right? How do we raise awareness of the importance of these spaces, the complexity of implementing them and of maintaining them, the fact that they do require resources, and that we should demand better and more robust public space in our communities? And I don't mean big signature parks. We tend to find money for those kinds of things. But why shouldn't every community have a great garden or playground that is carefully shaped and made for that community, and supported by public resources? I think limited awareness and low expectation are at the root of a lot of the questions that the CAPR project is asking. 

LS  You spoke about engagement and awareness, and I'm wondering if we could discuss the broader shift in landscape architecture to emphasize community engagement—how has that shifted the idea of value in a public space.

CM  Well, at it’s most basic level, the question is whether a community believes that the investment will benefit them. I think we've seen that suspicion in a lot of communities across the country that have been disinvested in. In those contexts, the idea of building something new is seen as a threat, as something that is going to have an adverse impact on a community because there's been this history of acting without listening first. There's this kind of anxiety that goes along with it.

If you can get past the sense of it being a negative or a threatening process, then there is the challenge of building up ambitions of what is possible. But our public space literacy is very low in this country. People aren't necessarily comfortable using public spaces in everyday ways. They don't expect that a place should look or feel any different than the disinvested park that they've known since they were kids. So elevation of public space literacy is something that is central to this exercise.

Successful engagement looks to bring people together to discover what's possible. It is not telling somebody, “This is what it's going to be”, but rather saying, “Here is what we can do, this is what you have said you're interested in having. Here's a way to fulfill what is meaningful to you and is particular to the place that you live, and it's not just something that's generically been pulled from someplace else.”

LS  I love that—the particularity of place is a way of reflecting back that the community has been heard and that they have a stake in this landscape.

CM  Can I add one other thing, that comes to mind? There’s also been this reticence to make long-term capital investments because they might not prove successful. Part of the reason that those investments have not been successful is because they've not been maintained, and so people no longer use them. Unfortunately, I feel we've moved into this sort of pattern where we're unwilling to make meaningful capital commitments. Instead, we're very focused on activations and temporary programs as the stand-in for those longer-term investments.

I love a good pop-up, but it's a dangerous moment to say that we don't need to invest in the long-term. Short-term activations don’t inherently build stewardship or community or lead to long-term health. It's also the case that over time, if there isn't a sort of a larger agenda associated with it, temporary interventions end up being more costly; an operator ends up spending a lot of money without any return on the equity they invested. And so getting back at this question of metrics, we utilize tactical urbanism and placemaking strategies because we are so afraid to make real investments in public spaces. And part of the reason that we're afraid to make those investments is because resources are so limited that if our investment fails, then we'll never have access to those resources again.

LS  Before I came to this research, I thought of maintenance and operations as the client or owner's issue. But I'm wondering how your attention to the issues of maintenance and operation have informed how you, as a designer, feel responsible for making a landscape.

CM  I think that the discipline, generally and rightly so, designs in direct correlation to the owner’s capacity to maintain the space that we're asked to think about. So the client’s capacity, from a labor, resource, and technical capacity ends up driving a great deal of the design decisions. There's a book that was recently published called Parks of the 21st Century: Reinvented Landscapes, Reclaimed Territories. One of the authors, Victoria Newhouse, has an interesting essay where she talks about the difference between the design of Chinese, American, and European contemporary parks. She notes that in China, there's a great deal of labor available –low-cost labor, frankly. In that context, you see more complicated landscapes from a design point of view, because there's greater capacity to maintain them. In the American context, the design of public spaces is often much simpler. One might even say, dumbed down.

In the municipal park operations space there's a term called “mow and blow” which refers to cutting grass and clearing debris. Oftentimes that's all that you can get anyone to do, both from a resource point of view but also from a skill point of view. As a result, we as a discipline end up having to design to those capacities, right? We must simplify what we imagine as designers, because there isn't the ability to maintain it –and there isn't the capacity to do anything different than what has already been done. I don't mean to come off as the pretentious, fussy designer who only wants to have fancy things—that's not what I'm implying at all. What I am suggesting is that things often look the same—become disconnected from place—because there isn't the willingness to make both the investment in the upfront costs, and the longer term investment of upkeep and maintenance and operation.

This is something that came up in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) research that we undertook. Lilia, I think you identified that the portions of pandemic funding from federal relief that went to public space was most often used for funding deferred maintenance projects. So, all that money was just getting urban public spaces back to baseline levels. It wasn't making any great improvement; it wasn't changing anything; it wasn’t building anything new. It was just catching up.

To me, that reality is the clearest indictment of the situation we are in when it comes to public space in the American context. The occasional generational public investment—in this case, ARPA funding from the federal government—isn’t used to create something new or transformative for our cities. It’s used to fix up what’s been neglected. To me, that represents both a lack of imagination and a lack of will—two things that I believe would benefit enormously from greater advocacy for high-quality public space of every American, and the myriad societal benefits they deliver. 

This interview was conducted for Perspectives 01 and has been edited and condensed for clarity.