Privately owned public space: does it matter who owns it?

Many of our cities’ public spaces are privately owned these days – and their numbers are rising. But are the suspicion and hostility they’re often met with justified, asks architecture and design writer Claire Dowdy?

Privately owned public spaces (POPS) have a terrible image. The press and social media love to highlight the sometimes bizarre rules of behaviour and heavy-handed security that the public can be subject to. In 2017, the Guardian described “the insidious creep of pseudo-public space in London”. Oh, for the good old days – the story goes – when citizens could roam freely over publicly owned parts of the city.

Where does this anathema come from? As Matthew Carmona, professor of planning and urban design at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London (UCL), explains, the feeling is that public spaces in cities are becoming commercialised, privatised, securitised, homogenised and exclusionary, because they are shaped by the narrow interests of the few (the developers) instead of the many (society as a whole).

“These arguments even extend to those public spaces that are owned by the public sector, on the basis that they are subject to similar pressures because of the way their management is increasingly contracted out or unduly influenced by the private sector,” says Carmona.

But are POPS – from the atrium of Trump Tower in New York City, to More London on the UK capital’s south bank – un-civic or just misunderstood? The story of POPS is not that simple.

Debunking the myths Several myths have risen up, some of which are ripe for debunking. Private or partially private ownership of parts of the public realm is not a recent phenomenon; there are rules of conduct for virtually everywhere the public can go. Some POPS have been created out of neglected, inaccessible land, some are created because municipalities no longer have the funds to make and (more importantly) maintain public spaces. All of which suggests that a better understanding of the complexities of POPS would benefit everyone.

“If you go back in time, pretty much everything was either privately owned, such as garden squares with keys, or public – such as squares run by the council. That was straightforward,” says past RICS president John Hughes FRICS, partner at Hemson Consulting in Toronto.

Having originated in the US, POPS have gone global. They arrived in the UK in the 1980s, with London’s Canary Wharf and Broadgate Centre among the first large, secure, privately controlled public places. Since then, space has been reduced in cities across the world.

“As you get denser cities, the ability to create new public space is difficult,” says Hughes. And this is where POPS can come into their own. “You can squeeze a POPS into a smaller development area rather than a public park. It’s a little easier to find the space for that.”

Couple that with squeezed municipal budgets around the world, and it’s easy to see why there’s more awareness of new POPS than new publicly owned spaces. Hughes cites two projects in Toronto that illustrate funding differences: CIBC Square and Rail Deck Park. “CIBC Square is a fine example of an extremely valuable and needed piece of public space being created and paid for by a developer as part of a big office development,” he says.

Joint-led by developers Ivanhoé Cambridge and Hines, CIBC Square comprises a pair of office towers on a 3m ft2 (278,709 m2) downtown campus, with an elevated park connecting them to Greater Toronto. With its slopes and hills, horticulture, gardens, shade groves, balconies and viewing points, the park “will provide a space to convene and refresh, and for corporate tenants to host memorable events”, according to the development partners.

Meanwhile, Rail Deck Park is a proposal endorsed by the city council to cover over a rail corridor in the centre of the city with 21 acres (8.5 ha) of parkland. The council states the intention is for the park to “transform this unused air space into Toronto’s next great gathering space for recreation, culture and celebration”.

“It’s an ambitious plan to create a public park, but it faces funding challenges,” Hughes says of Rail Deck Park. The current estimated development cost is C$1.66bn (£989.5m). “It’s a work in progress without a clear future, because of the challenge of capital acquisition and operating funds.” Funding public space

It’s vital to recognise the difference between the cost of funding a park and then spending more on maintaining space over the years, warns Hughes. “Unfortunately, you can end up with nicely designed and finished parks, but after 10 years the paving breaks down, and you end up with a patch of asphalt. That’s cityowned facilities. However, a very successful office development won’t want to see deterioration of the land, so they would want to retain control and look after it.”

The POPS with obvious civic credentials are those built on previously inaccessible land. Carmona cites London’s Canary Wharf and Greenwich Peninsular. “Those places were never public spaces; they were ex-industrial areas that didn’t have public access.”

Likewise, the new district of Barangaroo is being built on a disused stretch of Sydney’s dockyards. At 54 acres (22 ha), it’s the city’s largest urban renewal project since the 2000 Olympic Games. When completed, more than half the site will be open public space, and the whole 2.2km foreshore walk will be accessible to the public.