Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener for the young cultural anthropologist Setha Low. “I thought it was so cool that everybody was there together,” she tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “… Everybody was talking. Everybody knew their place. It was like a complete little world, a microcosm of Costa Rican society, and I hadn’t seen anything like that in suburban Los Angeles.”

That epiphany set Low, now a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, onto a journey filled with the exploration of public spaces and a desire to explain them to the rest of the world. This trek has resulted in more than a hundred scholarly articles and a number of books, most recently Why Public Space Matters but including 2006’s Politics of Public Space with Neil Smith; 2005’s Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity with S. Scheld and D. Taplin; 2004’s Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America; 2003’s The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture with D. Lawrence-Zuniga; and 2000’s On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.

Low is also director of the Graduate Center’s Public Space Research Group, and has received a Getty Fellowship, a fellow in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States.

She was president of the American Anthropological Association (from 2007 to 2009) and has worked on public space research in projects for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and was cochair of the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity’s Public Space and Diversity Network.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: What is a public space? Setha Low is an anthropologist of space at the City University of New York. Here she discusses problems with defining public spaces and, more importantly, why public spaces matter.

Setha Low, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Setha Low: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to our discussion.

David Edmonds: We’re talking today about public space. What is public space?

Setha Low: That’s always a hard question to start with, because a lot of people like to debate, what do we mean by public space? I like to think of public space in a fairly straightforward way, which means anywhere that everyone has access to. But I am particularly interested in open spaces where there’s open access. Lots of people argue that public space needs to be owned by the government, or governmental space, or it needs to be in some way institutionally, public or not. And you can get into all kinds of refinements among researchers, like myself, about what we really mean.

And in fact, I’ve gone so far as to argue with them that we’re not always talking about the same thing. In my case, I usually am studying parks and plazas and streets and sidewalks and little found spaces under bridges, and kinds of places that really everyone is expected to use, but others really mean something different.

David Edmonds: That’s interesting, because the spaces you’re talking about are all free to enter, where some people talk about public spaces like local sports facilities, where you do have to pay, but they’re still public.

Setha Low: Exactly. And as I said, I think the best way to think about it is to think about it in a layered way. I’m most interested in those that really are open and really everyone can be the ones we talk about as being democratic and that have all these incredible goods that they give to society, they offer us so much. But there are lots and lots of kinds of spaces in which there is a door or a library. In the United States, libraries are free and they’re public and you can’t be charged. Or places that then have a public stadium, but everyone can go as long as they can pay the fee. So there’s all these gradations, really, of publicness that we’re talking about. And the question is, from a researcher’s point of view, from a social scientist’s point of view, are they all the same? Can we compare them all, or should we be thinking about them as separate kinds of spaces. Even open spaces with open access, like a park, could be owned privately, and therefore not really, in some senses, be as public as it would be otherwise. And you have them where you are, as well as here in New York City.

David Edmonds: That’s very interesting. So in theory, a park that was owned by a private corporation could be public, although I guess one difference is that the private company could at any stage, close it down …

Setha Low: … or guard it, or police it, or have private guardian or have specific kinds of rules or limitations that would change it from the public realm, One of the most contested spaces in the United States, which I think is interesting, is like a mall. A mall is a private space. Now, as you say, lot of malls in the United States are actually open air. They’re not all so covered, so you don’t have to enter. However, since it’s privately owned, certain behavior, decorum, dress is required, and the right to political speech is contested. And one would argue, from one point of view, is in the winter here, there are a lot of older people and mothers with children who use them all to do their everyday walking, and it becomes kind of like a park or a plaza inside. And yet there are limitations to what they can do, and limitations of the people that they let in. In large malls in Iran, it’s the one place that women feel safe to go and walk. There are places that feel more public safe for Iranian women than other spaces, an open park. So there’s a lot of contradictions. It’s not as simple as it sounds, and one needs to tease out what one’s talking about, because the implications are that some of these spaces produce different social outcomes than others.

David Edmonds: Right. So let’s get on to that now. All these gradations about what counts as public space, how one defines public space. But I guess another route into this is to ask why public space is valuable?

Setha Low: That is another route here. And there is an incredible literature, as anyone listening to this podcast probably knows, about all the goods. I recently wrote a book, Why Public Space Matters, simply to put together all the evidence that we had in one place so that, say you wanted to bring to your regional government’s attention, that you want to save a public space. Why should it matter? And it runs through the very grand ideas that public space is the one place that you can see everyone in your society, and therefore it promotes democracy. I’ve written a little bit about those open public spaces where you can meet people who are different, have this incredible liberalizing effect on people. It can create a wider world view of the people using them, and it can lead to a public culture that allows difference to be with each other in a moment in time in which we’re politically polarized, socially segregated, so that there’s the democratic bringing-together, see others.

But there’s a lot of very concrete other things that go on. I mean public spaces where children are socialized and where they play and where they learn creativity. These are places where people work in 60 percent of the world, people work in informal economy. The informal economy — the workplace is public space. That means streets and parks and plazas and sidewalks. That means 60 percent of the Global South is making their living in public space. Public space are often the green spaces we have, so that they are one of the main places that contribute to sustainability in the city. They are places of cultural expression and cultural identity, where families, large families again, in a city like New York, or, may I say, London, where people come together in large families, they live in tiny apartments. This is where they come together, have their cultural festivals. And so it’s a re-inscription of cultural activities.

It’s a place after disasters, believe it or not, where people come together to rebuild. During Covid, parks took on a very special role. I argue many times that, from a social science point of view, it’s one of the things that city managers co