The Public Commons

I ran across a TED Radio Hour program from 2021 titled “The Public Commons.” The hour was all about how we can create public places that feel welcoming and safe for everyone, including young learners. Here’s some of what I learned:

Shari Davis is a community organizer and youth advocate in Boston. While working for the City of Boston, she launched Youth Lead the Change, the first youth participatory budgeting process in the United States. Shari now serves as the co-director for the Participatory Budgeting Project, a group committed to helping others figure out a different approach to deciding how public money is spent.

Davis believes in public spaces and their ability to offer safety and creativity. She emphasizes that, even though many think public spaces are unsafe, they really are the safest places to be if they are populated and utilized. Public spaces also offer an unbelievable capacity for individuals and groups to exhibit their creativity. Davis points to our public libraries as spaces that just aren’t used the way they could be. Instead of being places ignored by so many today, libraries could offer a safe and creative space to build communities – a sort of public commons to play and learn.

Public spaces can also serve as places where community-led decision-making depends on participatory budget-making. Instead of city councils or school boards deciding how money is spent, it’s actually the communities that make that decision. Special to Shari Davis and her colleagues is something known as youth-focused participatory budget-making.

Youth-focused participatory budget-making relies on young people to make decisions on how resources will be used, to not only serve the best interest of those young people, but also how those resources will be used to improve the lives of older members of a community. Davis shares a story where young people used Boston public dollars to buy land to develop park space. Instead, after finding out the land laid on top of a major archeological dig, those youth decision-makers let the community share in and learn from what was happening at the dig. The experience built a community of young and old learners.

Unlike the United States, entire countries utilize participatory budget-making. Paris, France budgets over $100 million annually to allow their communities, young and old, to decide how money will be spent in their neighborhoods.

Davis has found that those communities that commit to and practice the art of participatory budgeting leads to stronger community relationships, and in turn leads to communal behavior changes for the better.

Eli Pariser is currently co-director of New_Public, a nonprofit dedicated to building thriving digital public spaces. Pariser has an optimistic vision for our digital spaces. He says that by structuring them like real-life parks, libraries, and town halls, we can create more welcoming, safe places online.

Pariser is famous for introducing the term “filter bubbles.” “Filter bubbles” allow an internet user to see only what a social media giant’s algorithm wants them to see. According to Pariser, this is absolutely the wrong way to use the internet.

Instead, Pariser asks us a question: “What do we need from platforms to better build public commons?”

Pariser encourages us to think about platforms as spaces. Spaces can change behaviors – for good and bad. The best physical spaces have rules. Pariser wonders if these types of rules could be applied to today’s digital platforms.

For this to happen, Pariser wants all of us to begin thinking about embracing four steps to a better digital world:

Welcoming

Connecting

Understanding

Acting

“Welcoming” wants us to ask ourselves the following question – do I belong with this group?

“Connecting” asks the question “How do we bring groups together?”

“Understanding” requires us to make meaning together.

And “Acting” expects us to do something together to make a difference in the world.

Pariser believes that “the magical algorithm” does not exist, and instead, we should spend most of our energy and time developing the four-step process listed above to building online or in-person public commons.

In order to do this, Pariser wants to see a new group of gifted digital planners, modeled after Jane Jacobs and her work to improve urban neighborhoods and areas in the 20^th century, produce public online spaces that are connected, valued, and provide each internet citizen with a certain amount of agency.

If this is done, according to Pariser, we can fix the internet potholes.

Matthew Mazzotta is an artist and activist focused on the power of the built environment to shape relationships and experiences. Mazzotta works with local residents to invent spaces – from active systems that convert dog waste into energy to light city parks to physically transformable building that turn main streets into movie theaters to traveling dining experiences that bring together chefs and climate scientists to serve meals made of local plants endangered by climate change.

That transformable building that turns main streets into movie theaters can be found in Lyons, Nebraska.

The city park that converts dog waste into energy to illuminate lighting can be found in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The dining experience, titled “Harm to Table,” can be found hosting meals, while highlighting the dangers of climate change, across the country.

Mazzotta believes in the power of the built environment. And he also believes this:

“If people can sit together, they can dream together.”

So what does this all mean for finding a better path to learning?

It’s simple.

We need to start using space better so that our young learners can become smarter and stronger. And the traditional system hasn’t shown much interest in using space, other than continuing to build brick and mortar schoolhouses, any better than 100 years ago.

Til tomorrow. SVB