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The New Urban Agenda, adopted in 2016, represents a landmark global policy framework for urban development, emphasizing the creation of sustainable, inclusive, and resilient cities. Central to this agenda is the recognition of public space networks as essential components of urban morphology, fostering social interaction, economic exchange, and environmental sustainability. The chapter contrasts the New Urban Agenda with the functional segregation model of the Athens Charter, highlighting the shift towards polycentric, well-connected urban forms. It underscores the benefits of public space networks, including enhanced social inclusion, health, and economic productivity, supported by recent research and interdisciplinary findings. The text also discusses the implementation challenges and the need for a radical reform in urban policy and practice, emphasizing the role of public space in urban resilience and adaptation. Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and historical case studies further illustrate the dynamic and self-organizing nature of urban place networks, underscoring the importance of understanding and leveraging these networks for future urban development.
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Abstract
Public spaces, and their intimate structural relationship to private spaces, have long been a central interest of urban morphologists. Recent developments in network science have shed new light on the complexity of public space networks, with specific implications for policy, education, and practice. These developments come at a historical moment when all 193 member states of the United Nations have recently adopted by acclamation the New Urban Agenda, a landmark framework agreement for global urbanization through 2036. As it happens, the New Urban Agenda has much to say about public space networks, their structure, and their importance—but implementation remains a historic challenge.
11.1 Introduction
In October 2016, delegates from the member states of the United Nations joined stakeholders from civil society, government, academia, business, and the professions to conduct the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador. This third conference of the Habitat series would, like its predecessors, set an agreed global policy framework for urban development for the next 20 years. The conference produced an outcome document, known as the New Urban Agenda, which was agreed upon by a vote of the delegates to the conference. In December of that year, the New Urban Agenda was adopted by acclamation by all member states of the UN at the General Assembly (United Nations 2016). As such, the New Urban Agenda represents a landmark global agreement in urbanization policy through 2036.
The New Urban Agenda was developed at a time of unprecedented rapid urbanization around the globe—particularly in the Global South—as well as a time of growing challenges affecting cities: environmental threats (climate change, resource depletion, ecological destruction) as well as threats to the well-being of urban residents (inequality, poverty, fragmentation, geopolitical instability). Lurking behind these other problems were economic challenges: the need to create a more equitable and more sustainable prosperity, and the need to avoid disruptive economic events.
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Accordingly, the New Urban Agenda sets goals for human development, opportunity, health, and well-being, for all urban residents (rich and poor, young and old, healthy and infirm, etc.). It recognizes the need for new and more sustainable models of urbanism and urbanization, including more sustainable urban forms. It also recognizes the need for new digital technology to support urban development. However, as the document makes clear, this is a technology that must be supporting, not replacing, the organic city of physical contacts—and importantly, of public spaces.
More broadly, as this paper will show, the New Urban Agenda calls for a radical reform in the ways we think about urban form, and in particular, what Jane Jacobs called “the kind of problem a city is.” There is a strong critique of business-as-usual urban policy and practice and its sprawling, high resource-consumption forms of urban development. There are echoes in the work of Jacobs and other leading urban reformers of the late twentieth century, as we will explore.
11.2 Background
The New Urban Agenda, subtitled “Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All,” contains 175 paragraphs running over 30 pages, and contains a preamble, a section titled “Our shared vision,” another titled “Our principles and commitments,” and another titled “Call for action.” The next major section is titled “Quito implementation plan for the New Urban Agenda,” with subheadings “Transformative commitments for sustainable urban development,” “Effective implementation,” and “Follow-up and review.”
The document is notable for its normative emphasis on certain urban forms, including “well-connected,” “polycentric,” “urban spatial frameworks,” “compactness and density mixed use,” “public transportation walking and cycling,” and “public space networks.”
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Indeed, public space is discussed extensively in the document, and is the subject of no fewer than nine separate paragraphs. Public space is emphasized not only as a mere amenity, but more fundamentally, also as a pervasive and necessary component of urban morphology. Its network structure, including the structure of street and sidewalk paths, is given particular emphasis:
We will support the provision of well-designed networks of safe, accessible, green and quality streets and other public spaces that are accessible to all and free from crime and violence, including sexual harassment and gender-based violence, considering the human scale, and measures that allow for the best possible commercial use of street-level floors, fostering both formal and informal local markets and commerce, as well as not-for-profit community initiatives, bringing people into public spaces and promoting walkability and cycling with the goal of improving health and well-being. (United Nations 2016, para. 100)
11.3 The “New Paradigm” of Public Space Networks
Note the emphasis on “networks of… streets and other public spaces.” There is also emphasis on “the human scale,” “the best possible commercial use of street-level floors,” and “promoting walkability and cycling.” Thus, we see that the New Urban Agenda conceives of urban space as an interconnected, multimodal network, with an intimate relationship between the public and private realms.
This is a view of cities that is consistent with recent developments in network science. The so-called “science of cities” emphasizes the understanding of cities as complex adaptive systems that are not only partly planned but also partly evolved (Batty and Marshall 2012).
This view of cities also stands in stark contrast to earlier, dominant theories of city planning, as many authors have pointed out going back at least to Jacobs (1961), Alexander (1965), and Hillier et al. (1976). These authors point to a functionally segregated model, articulated in seminal documents such as the 1933 Athens Charter, developed by a highly influential group of architects known as the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne, and later published (Le Corbusier 1943).
As shown by Mehaffy and Low (Fig. 11.1, 2018), the New Urban Agenda differs from the earlier Athens Charter in several fundamental ways: the zoning of urban elements, the treatment of streets, the treatment and placement of buildings, the treatment of historic structures and patterns, the role of specialists in relation to other co-producers, and the role of time and evolution in the city. In these six respects, at least, the two documents are almost diametrically opposed.
Fig. 11.1
Comparison of the key urban concepts in the Athens charter of 1933, and the new urban agenda of 2016. Adapted From Mehaffy and Low (2018)
In fact, a number of key collaborators in the development of the New Urban Agenda have pointed specifically to the contrast between these two documents. Joan Clos, Secretary-General of Habitat III and a key shepherd of the New Urban Agenda, joined prominent sociologists Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett, and Professor of Urban Studies Ricky Burdett, to author The Quito Papers, a series of essays on the New Urban Agenda. Regarding the continued influence of the Athens Charter, and the need for its repudiation, they could not be more clear:
…Many of the 94 recommendations of the 1933 Charter of Athens still determine the generic forms and physical organization of the twenty-first century city. The patterns of urbanization today require a re-framing of the discourse and practice of planning. (Sassen et al. 2018).
The New Urban Agenda, in fact, represents a “new paradigm” according to Clos (2011). In place of the model of public space as a complex zone of mixing and interaction, public space is simply one more functionally segregated amenity or pathway, amid a rationally segregated scheme of all such urban objects. The entire scheme manifests what Jane Jacobs called “decontaminated sortings.” Yes, the problems of overcrowding, disease, and dangers from vehicles are resolved through this segregation; but the baby of urban vitality is thrown out with the bathwater. It is, in fact, the death of public space, as a vital zone of interaction and encounter—a point vividly illustrated by a 1948 drawing by Adolf Bayer (Fig. 11.2).
Fig. 11.2
“Order and disorder,” by Adolf Bayer, 1948. The problems of the older cities are solved through functional segregation—but the result amounts to the death of public space, replaced by long, isolated pedestrian paths and loose swirls of anti-space
By contrast, in the New Urban Agenda, “Public space” can be seen as the foundation of a broader system of urban form and urban spatial networks, containing a complex mix of public, private, and in-between spaces—and creating, or conditioning, a broad range of human and natural impacts. Public space is, according to this view, the foundation of urban connectivity.
11.4 A New Recognition of the Benefits of Public Space Networks
The New Urban Agenda also explicitly identifies a number of benefits provided by public space, which do in fact have support in the research literature. Among them:
“Social interaction and inclusion”
“Human health and well-being”
“Economic exchange”
“Cultural expression”
“Improving the resilience of cities to disasters and climate change”
“Physical and mental health”
“Household and ambient air quality, to reducing noise”
“Promoting attractive and liveable cities [and] human settlements”
“Prioritizing the conservation of endemic species”
There is also linkage between the public space language in the New Urban Agenda, and a very similar provision in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations 2015). The New Urban Agenda states, “We commit ourselves to promoting the creation and maintenance of well-connected and well-distributed networks of open, multipurpose, safe, inclusive, accessible, green and quality public spaces.” The Sustainable Development Goals’ Target 11.7 also states: “By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces.” This mirroring of language was not an accident, but was an explicit aim of our colleagues at UN-Habitat to tie the language on public space together in the two documents.
As noted, the recent research literature does bear out the vital importance of healthy public space networks in the life of a city. We are now learning of the importance of so-called “weak ties” formed in public spaces and adjoining semi-public ones, versus “strong ties” formed at home or work, and in most social media relationships (Granovetter 1973; Henning and Lieberg 1996). The weak ties play a key role in producing new social contacts, new knowledge, and new opportunities. By contrast, strong ties tend to reinforce only what or who is already known. Thus, weak ties, and the public space networks in which they predominantly occur, play a key role in fostering innovation, knowledge spillovers, and economic productivity.
Roche (2020) finds confirming evidence for this idea, She explores how “how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange,” and finds that “variation in street network density may explain regional innovation differentials.” This extends right down to Jane Jacobs’ “lowly” sidewalk contacts, an essential part of the public space network of the city. As Jacobs put it, “Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow” (Jacobs 1961, p. 72). It now appears that other important forms of literal wealth also grow from the weak-tie contacts.
Other researchers have found important benefits from well-structured public space, including other economic benefits, improved health and well-being, ecological benefits, ecosystem services, heat island mitigation, and support for lower-carbon lifestyles (Low 2022; Litman 2022; Mehaffy 2015; Mehaffy and Low 2018; Kelbaugh 2019).
New findings from interdisciplinary researchers echo these benefits. Luis Bettencourt, a physicist turned urban research and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute as well as director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation says that “public space is central… It creates networks of interaction, jobs, and institutions” (quoted in Mehaffy 2021).
A particularly striking finding was by Klinenberg (2015) concerning the resilience of neighborhoods in the presence of stress events such as heat waves. Analyzing the Chicago heat wave of 1995, he found that one of the four “key conditions” that led to significantly greater levels of death was “the degradation and fortification of urban public space.” It seems that well-structured public space networks are not only highly beneficial, but in some cases, they can be a matter of life and death.
11.5 The Terra Publica Database of Public Space Research
In 2013, UN-Habitat formed a partnership with the Project for Public Spaces and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation to operate a series of conferences with a focus on the particular role of public spaces (Centre for the Future of Places 2021). The “Future of Places” conferences contributed some of the specific language and conceptualization of public space in the New Urban Agenda (Mehaffy 2021). Following the Habitat III conference and the adoption of the New Urban Agenda, Ax:son Johnson Foundation established the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and entered into another partnership with UN-Habitat to focus on implementation mechanisms for the New Urban Agenda, particularly in its emphasis on public space networks.
One of the projects of the new center was a compilation of research literature into a database of research. Known as TerraPublica, the curated database contains over 500 papers from a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, environmental psychology, economics, geography, urban planning, urban design, and other fields. From the actual archived copies of the papers, its team of researchers drew abstracts, methods, and key findings, distilling them down to a series of key conclusions for policy and practice. Importantly, they also identified gaps in the literature, or lacunae, that indicated where further research was needed, particularly in translating the partial knowledge into effective practical action and policy.
Well-published public space researchers were involved in the project, including Vikas Mehta and Setha Low, with a team of advisers including Ali Madanipour, Matthew Carmona, Emily Talen, Julian Agyeman, and others. Among the team’s conclusions:
There is a large but incomplete body of literature on public space, with many gaps.
It is scattered across disciplines, and the picture is fragmented.
Nonetheless, there are clear impacts from variations in public space structure as it relates to larger patterns of urban form and regional structure.
There are particular impacts in the relation between public space and adjacencies of private spaces.
These structures have impacts on urbanization pathways for resilience and adaptation, among other impacts.
The field is dynamic, with exciting new developments.
These findings serve as the outlines of a new research agenda for urban public space, with a focus on the implementation tools and methods for the goals of the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
11.6 Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic
This comes at a time when there are important lessons emerging from recent events—none more salient than the COVID-19 pandemic. There were many early and tentative conclusions in the pandemic, none more erroneous than the idea that public space would no longer be important in the age of Zoom, home deliveries, the “retail apocalypse,” and other transformations. On the contrary, it seems clear that most people deeply missed access to public spaces and their adjoining “third places,” and as the pandemic waned, they returned to these places in throngs. Moreover, as the work of Klinenberg and other researchers has shown, public space will continue to play a truly vital role in human affairs.
Another early fallacy, later disproved, was that density was the enemy of human health and well-being, and that dense cores of cities might even become artifacts of the pre-pandemic past. On the contrary, it is not density, but the pattern of connectivity, that is the issue—as the figure below demonstrates. Each of the three urban and building forms below (Fig. 11.3) has the same density, 75 units to the hectare (40 units to the acre). But the potential for viral transmission is far higher in the tall building (upper left), with its centralized lifts or elevators, lobbies, and entrances, than in the more dispersed rowhouse typology (middle). The perimeter-block typology at lower right has a somewhat higher potential for transmission, but still significantly lower than the tall building. Density is not the enemy.
Fig. 11.3
Three urban and building forms, each with the same density, but very different patterns of connectivity and potential transmission of pathogens.
Source the author, adapted from the UK Urban Villages Forum (1999)
Another important lesson is that public space can connect even as it protects—as it must always do. We might replace the idea of “social distancing” (staying away from others) with the idea of “sociable distancing”—remaining connected to others, even as we maintain safety (Fig. 11.4).
Fig. 11.4
The author demonstrates “sociable distancing” with his daughter and grandchildren, as they occupy a classic American front porch, and he can continue to interact with them safely from the street
11.7 Place Networks: The Complex (and Self-Organizing) System of Public and Private Spaces
This point bears repeating: all public space must protect us as well as connect us. It must protect us from dangerous vehicles, natural hazards, crime, disruption, and other threats to our well-being. Moreover, it must provide affordances to us to vary these structures, so that we ourselves can “dial in” our level of contact and seclusion, exposure, and comfort.
We do this routinely in the rooms of our houses: we open or lock doors, close windows, draw blinds, invite others in or not, depending on our needs and desires for contact, and with whom and under what circumstances we choose. This is what our buildings are, after all: private spaces claimed out of the formerly public ground on which they sit, and defined (and controlled, in their degree of privacy) by walls, doors, windows, locks, blinds, and the like.
In the example of the porch above, we still occupy a room-like space, but the enclosure is a bit more ambiguous. Here, however, there are tacit rules for those who may occupy the space, and under what circumstances. A visitor may walk up to the door and knock. We may then receive them into the house, invite them onto the porch, or turn them away. If we do not answer, they are not free to sit down on our porch and enjoy themselves for an indefinite period of time!
The same is true to a lesser extent with other kinds of spaces, along the gradient from the most private (e.g., our bedrooms and bathrooms) to the most public (e.g., a public park). Even in the most public spaces, there are still methods of operating as quasi-private spaces, with some measure of control of our contact with others. For example, if I and my family spread out a picnic blanket in a park, and perch on it, someone might inadvertently step on a corner of it. They would then almost certainly apologize, and be on their way. But imagine if that person walked into the center of the blanket and sat down! This would be an obvious violation of our privacy, and an act of aggression. Indeed, it would almost never happen, unless there was some kind of altercation—or soon there would be, perhaps. Yet the picnic blanket is in a public park, the most public kind of space!
The same thing happens to other degrees in other kinds of spaces. Consider, for example, the sidewalk café. I walk past, and see you at a table. I stop to chat briefly, and a waiter might come up to take my order. If I decline, and then you leave, the waiter might come back and gently remind me that I need to order, or leave. Yet the waiter doesn’t own the space—it is a public sidewalk. The waiter very likely does not even own the restaurant! Instead, a series of legal and tacit agreements defines who can use the spaces and under what circumstances. This informal set of rules is echoed in the urban form, in the group of sidewalk tables (perhaps demarcated by a planter or parklet structure), or from the picnic blanket, or form other physical structures.
11.8 The Dizzying Place Networks All Around Us
From all these examples, it can be seen that public space is an immensely complex network of people, places, institutions, governance rules, tacit rules, and much else. It is, as sociologist Bruno Latour (1996) put it, an “actor network” that contains “actors” of all kinds: human, spatial, institutional, etc.
Consider the photo in Fig. 11.5, a fairly ordinary “high street” in London, near where the author happened to live for several years. It contains literal rooms (bedrooms, living rooms, etc.) as well as “urban rooms”—yards, stoops, sidewalk or pavement areas, rooftop terraces, etc. All of these room-like spaces provide various kinds of connections: movement, sight, sound; sight but not sound or movement (the glass window); sound but not sight or movement (the hedge); sight and sound but not movement (the upper terrace); and so on. And in many cases, the degree of connectivity is controlled by one or more of the people: they can open gates, draw blinds, reposition chairs, and so on. It is a dizzyingly complex web-network of places, only some of which are indicated below with the red circles and lines.
Fig. 11.5
A montage of a fairly ordinary “high street: in London
In effect, this entire network forms a kind of “urban connectome” that brings all of the private spaces together into an immensely complex network, united by their public space foundations. Furthermore, all of these spaces are undergoing a slow self-organizing transformation, at many scales of space and time. People open doors, close blinds, remodel homes, open new shops—and build new buildings. Only some of this is performed by large collective institutions (e.g., city governments). Much of it is performed by individual citizens going about their business during the course of a day, a year, or a lifetime (Fig. 11.6).
Fig. 11.6
The “place network” of a city, extending from the most private rooms of a house, to the urban “rooms” of the street and the city
It is this complex network, partly self-organizing, that allows the people of a city to interact, to consume and exchange resources, to create, and to generate high levels of creativity and wealth. In effect, cities are “socio-spatial reactors” that allow catalytic processes to operate at many scales of space and time—right down to the scale of sidewalks, frontages, and entry doors.
The transformation of this place network also extends from the time scale of days to years, decades, and centuries. I went back to the same street 7 years later (Fig. 11.7) and the transformation was remarkable. In addition to the obvious change of several businesses, and some cosmetic differences, there were other transformations in the place network and its edges. The two upper roof areas received fencing, the business entrance at lower right received two planters to demarcate its stoop area, and the sidewalk café to the lower left went away.
Fig. 11.7
The same segment of street in 2005 (left) and 2012 (right)
We can see very similar processes occurring in the formation of some of the world’s great cities over many decades or centuries. Figure 11.8 shows a portion of Venice over about 100 years, in a famous study by Muratori (1959). The original cadastral plan was quite simple and grid-like, but the actual pattern that evolved was far more complex and even more complex in three dimensions. That complexity evolved as the result of countless actions by countless actors, following rules, seeking permissions, pursuing economic opportunities, making local agreements between adjacent owners, and applying the models and patterns of the local culture (Hakim 2008; Ben-Hamouche 2009).
Fig. 11.8
The evolution of a portion of Venice, Italy, over about 100 years.
We can see similar dynamics operating in the formation of informal settlements too, and in the complex order that they often manifest. Their form arises from countless iterative cycles of rule-based action and adaptation, not unlike the iterative processes found in biological growth, and in the complex patterns of fractals and other natural structures.
11.9 The Role of Perception and Experience in Places
There is an important reason that place network theory uses the term “place” instead of “space” or another similar term. The emphasis is on place, the human phenomenon as it is experienced by human beings, with both structural and experiential components. Abundant research in a number of fields is demonstrating the essential relationship between structure and experience, particularly as they play out in the human brain, and in human perception.
Indeed, we observe an important dimension of human experience and human impact in the structure of these place networks. Research demonstrates that we humans have a highly evolved ability to detect the conditions that are likely to promote our own safety and well-being. The neuroscience of aesthetics demonstrates this (Zeki 2019) as do other fields, such as the emerging topic called “biophilia”—our innate preference for naturalistic environments and geometric patterns (Kellert and Wilson 1993). My own recent research has also delved further into the aesthetic aspects of place networks through the ancient, and newly relevant, topic of symmetry theory. It seems that we humans have a basic need to be able to read our environments, and to perceive their deep symmetries—not only mirror symmetries, but rotational, translational, scaling, and other kinds (Mehaffy 2020).
11.10 Changing the “Operating System for Growth”
All of these processes—all of the rules, laws, codes, standards, models, incentives, disincentives, and other formal and tacit rule-based processes—constitute a kind of “operating system for growth” that governs what can be built and what cannot, and what complex structures will ultimately evolve under the actions and judgments of human beings, operating at many scales of institution, time and place. This is an immense and breathtaking kind of process, and it is really the heart of cities and their dynamics. And it is also one we must understand if we are to meet our current urban challenges, and do so with the kind of truly “new paradigm” that is needed—informed by the new understanding of the evolution of complex adaptive systems that is emerging from many fields of the sciences today.
All of these processes also deal with the essential relationship between public space and private spaces—which, as Secretary-General Joan Clos put it, is “the essence of cities.” As he told a reporter:
In general, the urban community has become lost in strategic planning, masterplanning, zoning and landscaping … All these have their own purposes, of course—but they don’t address the principal question, which is the relationship in a city between public space and buildable space. This is the art and science of building cities—and until we recover this basic knowledge, we will continue to make huge mistakes (Clos 2016).
11.11 A Note About Climate Change and Urban Form
One area where these findings are especially relevant today is the issue of climate change, as it relates to the contributions of urban form to greenhouse gas emissions—the subject of my own doctoral research. Once again, it seems that density is not the whole story. Density is indeed a major factor in the reduction of greenhouse gases per person—but it is far from the only factor. As the research demonstrates, other factors are also very important, including interconnected street patterns, walkability, mix of transport modes, mix of uses, and other factors (Mehaffy 2015). All of these factors are also closely related to the character of public space, and the characteristics of its place networks.
Once again, the qualitative and experiential aspects of place are essential. The aesthetic character of a city’s place networks seems to play an outsize role in whether people will walk, linger, interact, and otherwise engage within the critical realm of public spaces. There is also evidence that the aesthetic character of public spaces plays a role in levels of stress, health and well-being. As we have also seen from Klinenberg’s work, the activation of public spaces may also play a critical role in the resilience of a neighborhood or a city.
This implies an ethical imperative for architects: to use their art in service to this basic set of human needs, and not as a kind of arrogation of gigantic sculptures as “product packaging” over what too often seem to be toxic oil-age industrial products. That certainly applies to the climate “greenwashing’ that happens far too often—or, just as problematic, the careless imposition of artistic extravagance in place of human and ecological imperatives. This places the design professions squarely into a relevancy crisis of their own making, with the responsibility—the imperative—to find their way out.
11.12 Conclusion: The Challenge of Implementation at a Critical Time
The New Urban Agenda comes at a time of unprecedented rapid urbanization, coupled with the alarming fact that public space is currently in decline around the world. Instead, we are seeing a surge of automobile-encapsulated lifestyles, with their many heavy externality costs, and clearly unsustainable impacts; gated communities, exacerbating inequality and lack of equitable opportunity for human growth and well-being; inward-turning pseudo-public spaces, cut off from the surrounding city; and sprawling, resource-intensive (and unsustainable) land use patterns, in which public space is all but non-existent.
How can we address this challenge?
I think we must recognize the agenda before us: the actions and outcomes identified in the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, and the tools, tactics and strategies that have been developed toward their implementation. It is time to redouble our efforts to reform our ways of doing things—our “operating system for growth.” That includes all the laws, rules, standards, codes, financial incentives and disincentives, and especially, the mental models we use. We must finally replace the vestiges of a failed model, the “CIAM paradigm” of functional segregation, with a more polycentric, diverse, and self-organizing urban model, the paradigm outlined by the New Urban Agenda. And we can take great comfort, I think, in the availability of public space as a central platform for urban reorganization—offering us a place to get to work, a place to focus our efforts, and to apply the hopeful tools and strategies that have emerged in the last few decades.
To quote the last hopeful line of Jacobs’ masterwork (1961, p. 448): “Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” We might say the same about their public spaces.
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