11/29/2018 How Much Public Space Does a City Need?

– Next City

How Much Public Space Does a City Need?

BY GREGORY SCRUGGS | JANUARY 7, 2015

Circus elephants drink from water running along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. The
borough has the largest street grid in the world. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

H
ow much of Manhattan is dedicated to public space? For starters, there’s Central Park, but the
island’s oasis is only 1.3 square miles, 5.6 percent of the borough’s land area. You might
remember those swaths of green way uptown, like Highbridge Park and Inwood Hill Park (the
only natural forest left in Manhattan), but together they’re just another one-half square mile, accounting
for a mere 2.1 percent. Add in all the well-worn parks from Marcus Garvey to Bryant, the slivers of open
space along the rivers, privately-owned public spaces like Occupy’s Zuccotti Park, newfangled
innovations like the High Line, and Janette Sadik-Khan’s pedestrian plazas. Maybe 15 percent at best?

Guess again. When we think about public space, we picture parks and greenways, but overlook the
largest single public space asset in any city’s rolls: streets. Include the pavement New Yorkers traverse
every day in your public space calculation and the city’s most prosperous borough hits the magic
proportion: 49 percent.
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Magic, at least, according to the researchers at UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatories Unit, who last
year released the report Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity. They argue that
asphalt, hardscaped streets should be counted as public space right alongside our leafy parks and
landscaped plazas. Together, they should make up 45 to 50 percent of a city’s land area, with 30 to 35
percent of the area occupied by streets and 15 to 20 percent open space. “If less than 30 percent of the
land of the city is dedicated to the street pattern, it’s a huge error,” UN-Habitat Executive Director Dr.
Joan Clos says. “If you have less, you will have big congestion problems.”

The problems go beyond traffic snarls, according to the UN researchers, who found a correlation
between expansive street grids and prosperity. Manhattan, with 36 percent of its area is dedicated to
streets and a booming economy, has the largest street grid in the world thanks to a 1811 plan that
prioritized a reliable street pattern. Toronto, Barcelona — where Clos served as Mayor — and London,
all economically vibrant cities, aren’t far behind, while younger and poorer U.S. cities like Phoenix and
Los Angeles hit the sub-30 percent danger zone. It’s not incidental that Phoenix and L.A. — both car-
oriented places that developed with a more suburban form than older cities — have a smaller
percentage of their area dedicated to public streets. In these cities and in their suburban peers, large
lots and open spaces collude to create a very small overall percentage allocated to streets.

“In general, the American city has a good pattern of street allocation,” says Clos. “This is not so in
suburbia.”

Land area dedicated to streets in North America, Europe and Oceania cities.

Among cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the cities with the most area dedicated
to streets leaders are Hong Kong, with 34 percent and Tokyo, with 29 percent. Both are economic
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powerhouses. At the bottom of the street-area rankings, all with under 10 percent: Bangui, Central
African Republic; Yerevan, Armenia; and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Clos argues that these cities look more like the Phoenixes of the world than the Manhattans and
Barcelonas.

“The pattern of sprawl and suburbanization which is very frequent in the expansion cities of Latin
America, Asia, and Africa. The street pattern tends to be less than 10 to 15 percent. This kind of pattern
cannot support the future evolution of urbanization,” says Clos. “These parts of the city tend to resist
very badly when you want to increase the compactness or density because there is not enough street.”

Barcelona has more area dedicated to public streets than most cities.

In the fast-urbanizing global south where new cities are rising out of the ether, a functional street grid
can easily fall casualty to a hot real estate market that offers a tidy profit on the centrally located
parcels. Take street crossings, for instance, which can be threatened by the sale of land adjacent to busy
roads. UN researchers advocate keeping enough land public to ensure construction of at least 80
crossings per square kilometer in fast-growing cities. “Any less and you are certainly going to be in a
collapsed city,” Clos says. “Those are not prescriptions, but the consequence of studying the street
pattern of the world and correlating it with the congestion in many different matters.”

The report cites Nairobi, where four people were killed on Sunday when a six-story building on a
densely populated block collapsed, as a specific example of a city without an adequate street grid.
There, the number of intersections per square kilometer barely reaches 40 and many streets lack
sidewalks.

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Cities still must be conscious of how they use the precious
square feet, after all there is a big difference between St. Petersburg, Russia and Ouagadougou, Burkina
Faso, even though they have the same scant 15 percent of area dedicated to streets.

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Clos pointed to perennial pedestrian charmers

like his native Barcelona, Vienna, Amsterdam,
San Francisco, and Budapest as cities that
have their streets enough breathing room and
also made sure to design them to support a
thriving economy. Even if the Greek economy
has fallen on hard times, when Athens was
made the capital in 1832, a street plan laid out
over the 7,000-year-old city helped transform
it from a sleepy city of ancient ruins to a
metropolis befitting modern Greece. Nairobi has a low proportion of its land area
dedicated to public streets. (AP Photo/Ben
Curtis)
Laying out the streets, however, is only half
the battle. Especially in the automobile era, it’s
vital to make sure they serve more than just car traffic and provide a dynamic streetscape for all users.
“It is not just the amount of public space, but its quality of potential use, the process through which it
is created and owned, and its governance,” says Ethan Kent, Vice-President of Project for Public Spaces.

Ultimately, it’s not only about how much a city has by way of streets, but also what a city – and its
residents – do with them.

The column, In Public, is made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation.

BECOME A NEXT CITY MEMBER TODAY

Gregory Scruggs writes about cities and culture, especially in

Latin America and the Caribbean.

TAGS: NEW YORK CITY, PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, LOS ANGELES, PUBLIC

SPACE, WALKABILITY, LONDON, BARCELONA

4 Things to Know Before Your Water Is Privatized

BY RACHEL DOVEY | JANUARY 7, 2015

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(Photo by Jean Fortunet)

I
n New Jersey, a controversial new bill illumines a quiet-but-steady trend: municipal water
privatization.

Optimistically titled the “Water Infrastructure Protection Act,” the bill, which passed the state’s
Assembly on December 15th, points to aging water systems that are supposedly so deteriorated they are
“beyond governmental capacity to restore.”

“It is in the public interest that public entities have the option to transfer, lease, or sell water and
wastewater assets if there exists emergent conditions that threaten drinking water or the environment,”
it states.

But according to a slew of critics, including D.C.-based Food and Water Watch, the New Jersey State
League of Municipalities and the state’s Division of Rate Counsel, the Protection Act doesn’t really fall
under the category of public interest — because it excludes the public. Currently, any municipality that
wishes to sell its system has to go to the voters first through a ballot measure. That requirement would
be nixed under the current proposal, and would make the state similar to Illinois, Pennsylvania and
California.

Whether help or harm for local ratepayers, this likely is not the last bill of its kind. Right now, private
water companies serve about 15 percent of the U.S. population, but that number could soon skyrocket
thanks to several new federal laws and an investment gap of as much as $500 billion over the next 20
years. However, even as private water IOUs eat up an increasing chunk of the U.S. market, water
infrastructure’s decentralized nature — owned and operated by thousands of local municipalities, tied
to each individual watershed — means that little national data exists. When bills like New Jersey’s stir
controversy, local media is often forced into he-said, she-said coverage, without much information on
how privatization will actually affect the local system.

Here, then, is a roundup of the facts, figures, studies and articles that do look in-depth at the topic,
arranged around the common themes you’ll hear in a public meeting or read in the local paper when
system privatization comes up.

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The Numbers

Privately owned water systems serve close to 50 million customers, with investor-owned utilities
making up more than two-thirds of that market according to advisory firm Bluefield Research.
American Water has the largest customer base, followed by United Water, Aqua America, California
Water Services and American States Water. California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and
Florida tend to be especially attractive to private water suppliers because of their large populations and
state-level policies.

The Cost Factor

One fear often repeated by privatization critics is that it will raise rates — and some evidence does bear
that out.

According to a state-by-state cost comparison from Food and Water Watch, the average household
water bill for a private water utility customer is 33 percent higher than its public counterpart.

A comprehensive meta-analysis from the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management
didn’t find that high disparity, but did counter the widely marketed notion that municipal water
privatization increases system efficiency while lowering costs. Analyzing dozens of empirical studies
(some from as far back as the ‘60s) it found that results have been mixed for utilities bought by private
companies, with recent acquisitions showing less cost savings. Unlike the Food and Water Watch
comparison, the paper looked at utilities both in and outside the U.S.

The Quality Factor

Advocates for water privatization tend to downplay rate increases. Often their logic, captured in this
Wall Street Journal article, is that water infrastructure (some of it a century old) desperately needs
investment — and someone needs to pay.

So does the quality of infrastructure increase when an IOU takes over a crippled system, as
privatization advocates often claim it will?

Again, the answer is difficult to measure with ratepayers spread across 100,000 systems.

Food and Water Watch claims that 16 percent of privately held systems reverted back to public
ownership between 2007 and 2011, with quality a top complaint. However, The Pacific Institute has
analyzed private and public systems in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere to assess quality and
effectiveness, and, echoing the Wall Street Journal, its report does acknowledge chronic, long-term
under-investment as a top problem. However, the report concludes that privatization is not a “silver
bullet” for these costly issues — public, private and public-private systems can work effectively if
they’re properly staffed and funded. Often, some form of competition, even measuring staff
performance and rewarding effort, is present in successful agencies, the report found.

The Equity Factor

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of water privatization is how it can disproportionately impact low-
income ratepayers. This can come from steep cost increases as well as the manner in which certain
states regulate their water systems.

In California, for example, each municipality can only pay for its own system under state law. The
reason is that water infrastructure is inherently local — tied to each regional watershed. So unlike

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electricity, where increases are spread across a large, statewide base, rates to fund broken pumps and
pipes are much higher in smaller towns and cities, many of which also have the high poverty rates you
would expect to contribute to neglected municipal systems. In reporting in-depth on these rate hikes
in California, I saw bimonthly residential bills as high as $600 — four times the rate of neighboring
public municipalities — in areas where people lived only on fixed incomes.

Some organizations do offer low-income rate assistance with this problem in mind. However, it’s
often a small, double digit sum. California newspapers cover stories of people selling their cars and
skimping on medical care in areas with private systems.

The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

BECOME A NEXT CITY MEMBER TODAY

Rachel Dovey is an award-winning freelance writer and former

USC Annenberg fellow living at the northern tip of California’s
Bay Area. She writes about infrastructure, water and climate
change and has been published by Bust, Wired, Paste, SF
Weekly, the East Bay Express and the North Bay Bohemian.
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TAGS: CITY WATER, UTILITIES, PRIVATIZATION

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