I sat down with my own, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and quickly found myself unusually immersed. Somehow, it was easier to read among other readers. After about half an hour, some kind soul passed around snacks.

There’s no shortage of people saying that it’s rare, nowadays, to find people who read. The Atlantic, the Guardian, and the New Yorker have raised concerns about declining readership among 9-year-olds and college students alike. Researchers often attribute the phenomenon to how smartphones, and particularly applications such as Instagram, wreaking havoc on our attention span. At the same time, others decry the loss of public spaces, a process that rapidly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. People are picking streaming platforms over cinema halls; even parks are increasingly privatized.

But amid these twin crises, a new phenomenon has taken root in New Delhi: weekly reading clubs.

Perhaps ironically, I first learned about these communities on Instagram. I saw an account named “Lodhi Reads,” which had pictures of weekly meet-ups and information about future dates. The group met every Sunday in Lodhi Garden.

It was not the first reading club I had stumbled upon. During the pandemic, I was part of an online reading circle that would discuss socio-political texts on caste, capitalism, feminism, and surveillance. I participated enthusiastically—often volunteering to make posters to promote the sessions—but something seemed amiss. It wasn’t the material being discussed or the people; both were more than adequate in keeping the circle interesting. It was the fact that we were “meeting” online. Though I appreciated the effort to create a sense of community among readers, the Google Meet format was not for me.

So, with an interest in finding a real-life community among readers, I ventured out to Lodhi Gardens and spent three hours immersed in my book on a Sunday evening in June. I found the group easily, having seen the photos and description on Instagram.

Ankush Pal shares how he found a community of readers at Lodhi Reads. Courtesy of Lodhi Reads.

Afterward, I reached out to the curator, Ritika, on Instagram. She informed me that the group was inspired by Bangalore-based “Cubbon Reads,” which got its start in December 2022. Two friends, Harsh Snehanshu and Shruti Sah, would cycle to Cubbon Park to read and post pictures on their social media accounts. The posts attracted their friends to join them, and eventually more and more people started showing up. Cubbon Reads’ success started a flurry of similar groups popping up across the country—the second of which was Lodhi Reads. Today, there are a few other reading clubs in Delhi and neighboring regions—and the trend has even “gone global.”

A parallel experiment called Delhi Reads also got its start in December 2022. Two women, Molina and Paridhi, both graduates of the University of Delhi, met at a coffee shop after becoming friends through the social media platform Twitter (now X). Realizing there were few spaces in the city for young people that weren’t divided by education and social class—especially in the post-COVID era—they decided to do something about it.

While other reading circles get together in a particular spot to read silently, members of Delhi Reads meet once or twice a month to discuss whatever they have been reading and thinking about. Though it started as a book club, the group now focuses more on creating a sense of community; lately, the organizers have been experimenting with other activities, such as organizing film screenings and a local bookstore tour.

As my evening at Lodhi Reads came to a close, I realized that I’d gotten halfway through a book that I had been putting off picking back up for about a year, without even noticing that it was getting dark. All the participants gathered and organized their books in a pile so that someone could click a picture for Lodhi Reads’ Instagram account. On my way out of Lodhi Gardens, a fellow attendee struck up a conversation with me about the book I’d been carrying. They were interested in what the author had to say about the Russian Revolution and noticed that my copy had been published prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. Before we had formally met one another, our books had already struck up a dialogue. I went home filled with a unique sensation: having spoken few words yet being silently sure that I belonged.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Reading Among Readers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Illustration by Ruby Alvarado. Courtesy of artworxla.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square that Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

For this fifth and final installment, we pulled in people working to understand our contentious public debates. From vitriolic fights over race, gender, and sexuality to the polarized, partisan brawls over policy to the protests cropping up across U.S. campuses, our contributors share how we might make civil discourse more civil.

They tell us: How do we disagree in public?

The post How Do We Disagree in the Public Square? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Courtesy of Luis Ricardo Ramos, México/Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED).

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

For this fourth installment, our contributors think about how we might foster a public square that welcomes everyone—from its physical characteristics to its ethos. How does a flat, unobstructed surface exposed to the sun invite in more people? Can the public square in fact be a public triangle? Who are we empowering in our communities through public services? And might we be able to create a world that fits all worlds?

They answer these questions to tell us: What makes an inclusive public square?

The post What Makes an Inclusive Public Square? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Illustration by Samantha Duran. Courtesy of artworxla.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

Here, our contributors consider the rich building blocks of the public square: personal connections. In our segmented, often lonely world, they are shaking off the blues on the dance floor, telling tall tales over breakfast, and forming friendships through a seven-and-a-half-year-long book club.

They help us answer: How do we find connection in the public square?

The post How Do We Find Connection in the Public Square? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Illustration by Ruby Alvarado. Courtesy of artworxLA.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

Close to the ground, our contributors here take us from a mountainside greenspace in Los Angeles to a fishing village in Peru. From their respective corners of the public square, they show us how we might foster—and preserve—local community.

The post What Should Your Local Public Square Look Like? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I come to bury California’s parking lots, not to praise them.

The evil that abundant parking spaces do lives long after the ground is paved over.

So say the honorable officials and wise engineers of California. They tell us that parking consumes huge amounts of property that might be used more productively for business, housing, or transit infrastructure like bus or bike lanes. In L.A. County alone, parking covers 200 square miles. Most parking spaces are empty most of the time—people don’t park at home when they are at work, or park at work when they are at home.

Abundant and cheap parking encourages people to drive when they might walk or bike, which would improve their health. More driving means more accidents, and more injuries and death for car passengers and pedestrians. All that driving also creates pollution and greenhouse gases.

So, I understand why our cities are ganging up and sticking their knives into the Caesar of municipal parking requirements, the minimum number of spaces that must accompany new development. These requirements encourage sprawl, since parking requires more money and land, and property is cheaper and more plentiful far from our city centers. These rules also effectively block the construction of smaller, denser, more affordable housing, and the repurposing of old buildings for new purposes.

A number of cities are assassinating these requirements to make it easier to build new housing, without the extra costs and land necessary for parking. This year, Berkeley, following the example of a 2018 San Francisco ordinance, eliminated off-street parking requirements for new developments. Sacramento abolished its parking minimums as part of a broader zoning reform. San Diego and Oakland have eliminated parking requirements near transit, and San Jose may follow suit.

Now, higher levels of government are trying to finish off the parking lot. A bill from Assemblymember Laura Friedman of Glendale would eliminate parking requirements statewide for new buildings within half a mile of a transit corridor or major stop. President Biden’s infrastructure package includes provisions that would make it easier to eliminate parking requirements nationwide, in service of making construction more affordable.

I know such anti-parking policies are well-intentioned and honorable. And yet, I stare into the bleak future of the California parking lot, and my heart feels a strange sadness.

So, I speak now not to disprove what our honorable policymakers and editorial writers say, but here I am to speak what I have seen and known. Parking lots have been, for all their faults, good and true friends to me and our communities too.

Public lots often provide revenues to cash-starved cities. And local parking requirements also provide communities precious leverage with developers. Cities often offer exemptions from parking requirements in return for the developers providing more affordable units, or community benefits like parks, bus shuttles, or libraries to accompany their projects. Anti-eviction activists have used parking requirements to fight new developments that might displace existing residents.

But our state’s leaders say parking is a plague upon our communities. And they are wise and honorable people.

But have not parking lots provided great utility, even life-saving service, during the COVID-19 plague? Think how many more people might have died if our state didn’t have so many large parking lots—from Petco Park-adjacent lots in San Diego, to the Disneyland Resort parking garage in Anaheim, to the Cal Expo and State Fair lots in Sacramento—that could be turned into mass testing sites. Many of these same lots became centers for mass vaccination that finally allowed the state to control the coronavirus. No wonder Gov. Gavin Newsom gave his state-of-the-state speech at Dodger Stadium, surrounded by its ocean of heroic parking lots.

But the powers-that-be say parking lots prioritize cars over humans.

Sure, I did see hospitals use their lots to set up tents and house patients during COVID-19 surges. Communities turned parking lots into tent cities to shelter the homeless safely, and temporarily, with the virus spreading.

But those who would eliminate parking are right honorable public servants. Abundant parking, they remind us, robs our children of better futures. And they speak true.

Yet, with the state closing its schools and failing to provide reliable broadband, parking lots were all many young Californians had left.

Across the state, I encountered students without reliable Internet at home camped out in the parking lots of closed libraries and coffee shops so they could connect to the Wi-Fi they needed to continue their lessons. School districts routinely distributed laptops and books, and collected homework, in drive-through lines in their parking lots. And might our parking lots have saved in-person education itself, had they been allowed to become outdoor classrooms for our children?

Parking lots are bad for business, those honorable parking killers say. But weren’t parking lots also a godsend for business during the pandemic? Cities were aggressive in using their parking lots to allow restaurants and retailers to remain open and serve customers safely outside. Large parking lots became storage facilities for dormant rental cars, and for shipping containers that overflowed from ports whose workers couldn’t keep up with incoming traffic.

When our greatest gathering points closed, did not parking lots step in to provide solace and communal experience? In my hometown of Pasadena and so many other places, large parking lots became drive-in movie theaters. Churches, unable to safely use their sanctuaries, held services in parking lots; I took some comfort from a “drive-in Mass” I attended at the parking lot of Santa Rosa Catholic Church in Cambria.

You could even say parking lots saved democratic politics, as election rallies and events moved to drive-in. Might our fair state still be slurred daily by President Trump, without the dedicated service of so many parking lots to Joe Biden’s campaign?

I know that, after the traumas and loss of the last year, I am weak-minded and prone to cling to the familiar. I know that our honorable policymakers are right, and that we should rejoice, not cry, at the demise of the California parking lot. But my eyes, clouded by tears, see the progressive movement to reduce parking as both comedy and tragedy, of the kind Shakespeare might have written.

The post A Funeral Oration for the California Parking Lot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I wish our entire state was as broad-minded as the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area. The nearly 1,500-acre park, spanning both sides of the 60 Freeway in the city of South El Monte, isn’t just one of L.A. County’s largest and most popular parks. It’s a vision of what California might be.

These days, our state is a place of shifting rules and endless compliance, but you can do pretty much anything you can think of at Whittier Narrows, from boating to BMX biking, fishing to frisbee golf. Our state’s public places have become intensely designed and rigidly organized to keep different attractions in defined spaces, but much of Whittier Narrows is gloriously empty and unfussy. And while the richest people and places usually get the best stuff in today’s California, Whittier Narrows is an unparalleled gem in a working-class crossroads of greater Los Angeles.

Right now, Whittier Narrows feels especially glorious. California can’t stop itself from adding categories and qualifications, even when the task is as straightforward as giving everybody an essential shot in the arm. But Whittier Narrows is for everybody, all the time. You don’t have to make an appointment or wait in long lines to use it. You can get inoculated with all manner of rest and recreation whenever it works for you.

“A stroll through Whittier Narrows Park is never anything less than a walk through many worlds,” David Reid wrote in an essay published in the magnificent anthology East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte. “On any given day, the scent of carne asada barbeques wafts on a breeze that is suddenly interrupted by the scent of sunblock from a runner in full stride. The sound of buzzing model airplanes drawing figure eights above the canopy of trees is punctuated by the shots from the shooting range. Weekends are filled with rowdy soccer games and families flocking from distant corners of Southern California for reunions.”

Big family reunions are on hold and the ballgames have gotten smaller, but the park’s very existence also offers a tonic of optimism: Even dark moments in history can produce things worth celebrating. Whittier Narrows and its park also remind us that listening to regular people can sometimes produce pleasant surprises.

Whittier Narrows is a gap between the Puente and Montebello Hills through which the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers flow. The geology created a habitat for animals and plants, and a fertile site for people to grow crops. Its water was eventually eyed for urbanizing Southern California, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building a dam in the narrows as part of a 1938 flood control plan.

But a citizens’ committee spent a decade fighting the dam, which would have threatened thousands of residences, multiple school districts, farms, oil wells, and an Audubon Society bird sanctuary. In 1948, a local congressman named Richard Nixon brokered a compromise that moved the dam site about a mile, preserving some businesses, homes, the bird sanctuary, and other recreational land.

It was a decidedly mixed victory. The dam, completed in 1957, would still displace about 2,000 people, who were not compensated. The bird sanctuary—and nearby trails, lawns, and a lake—were handed over to county parks in 1970.

Whittier Narrows Park has since grown, in size and offerings. It’s ideal if, like me, you have three finicky children who never want to do the same thing. On our visits, we have gravitated to the three lakes—North, Center, and Legg—which are home to watercraft from rented pedal boats to model speedboats for racing. We’ve picnicked, walked and biked the trails around the lakes, and climbed on the large sea “creatures” on the shore, including a two-headed dragon and an octopus. These are distinctive and playful sculptures made by the Mexican artist Benjamin Dominguez; he also produced the inventive slides and play structures of La Laguna Playground in San Gabriel and Atlantis Play Center in Garden Grove.

We’ve thrown frisbees around the massive disc golf course on the park’s east side, which nearly extends to a second freeway, the 605. We’ve enjoyed the shade of the many large trees (including California live oaks, sycamores, and pines) around the baseball and softball fields west of Rosemead Blvd., a quieter spot these days with organized sports mostly shut down by the pandemic. And there’s still so much we haven’t checked out—like the shooting range, the horse center, the nature center, the military museum, and the urban farm.

The best thing about the park is the mix of people. You’ll encounter folks of all races and ages, the majority of them Latino, reflecting the demographics of the greater El Monte area. The atmosphere is friendly and welcoming.

Regional parks like Whittier Narrows, with their something-for-everybody approach, increasingly feel out of fashion. With land scarce, we give all the attention and accolades to smaller, prettier, highly designed parks in tight urban spaces. And the middle-class and working-class families served by Whittier Narrows or El Dorado Regional Park in north Long Beach or by Hansen Dam Recreational Area in the San Fernando Valley lack cultural power in a Southern California increasingly divided between, and defined by, rich and poor.

Which is another reason why Whittier Narrows should be celebrated. Today, in densely populated and pandemic-devastated Los Angeles County, such large parks, with plenty of space to spread out, are a lifeline.

One downside of having a lot of space is that large parks are fighting off proposals to take parts of their land for development. The wonder of Whittier Narrows is that it is appreciated enough that people want to expand it.

In December, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers offered to lease another 47 acres of land in the dam area for a park expansion. L.A. County responded by saying it might acquire the land outright. County officials disclosed three possible concepts for this park expansion—creating an entertainment venue for fairs and food festivals, adding full-sized soccer fields, or building a large cricket field and complex.

It’d be fitting if Whittier Narrows somehow manages to incorporate it all.

The post A Park for Everyone Offers a ‘Vision of What California Might Be’  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“The commons” is a concept, an ideal. The commons are property we all share, property that’s owned not by any one person or group, but that’s held—well, in common. It also has a distinct history in the U.S., harking back to early American towns having an actual commons, an undivided piece of land owned jointly by all the residents of a town. It was a place where all could graze their cattle, bury their dead, and meet for church and to make community decisions.

Today, the concept of the commons is under threat in a country that has become more focused on individual rights than on collective ones. We hear more about the “tragedy of the commons”—the economist’s phrase for what happens to jointly held resources like clean water or air when everyone acts in their own self-interest—than about the value of the commons.

To understand the long history of the commons in American life, I went looking for it. Little Compton, Rhode Island, where I live, has an actual, physical commons. The town green is officially “the Commons.”

Little Compton was originally part of the Plymouth Colony, which designed towns to include a space for the government and church in the center of things, embracing the idea of the commons both as civic space and as a way of governing. (This sets Little Compton apart from most Rhode Island towns, which lack town greens, and opposed established churches.)

When Little Compton was laid out in the late 17th century, each purchase from the Sakonnet people was divided among the 29 “First Proprietors,” men from Plymouth Colony who had been promised land on the frontier. An additional equal section was set aside for “Minister,” land to be rented or sold to support the church.

And then a plot of land in the center of town, about 20 acres, was set aside for the church and for government offices, a common burial ground, a pound for wandering animals, and space for the drilling of militia.

This plot was called the Commons from the start. In 1694 the town erected a building to be used as a combined town hall and church, tavern and poor house. It was a place for community in a community that still owned much in common and made decisions as a group. (Not an inclusive group, though: the town’s Native population, its enslaved and free African-Americans, and women were not present at the town meetings.) Among the early decisions at the town hall: the laying out of roads, apportioning the town’s allotment of salt, and the division of the town’s woods.

Ideas about community and what was properly owned in common changed dramatically over the following decades. In 1724 a new church, separate from the Town Hall, was built on the Commons, the beginning of the separation of church and state.

By the end of the 19th century, these official structures were joined by new types of semipublic buildings, fraternal organizations for narrower slices of community. The Grange was a gathering place for farmers, providing education and lobbying for their interests. The Odd Fellows Hall offered fellowship and opportunities for community service. The government expanded too: The poor house had moved, but now there was a school and a hearse house, for the shared, town-owned hearse. There were two churches, a Methodist church joining the Congregational one. There were also more spaces that were privately owned but publicly accessible, including a general store and shops. The federal government was represented by a post office, established in 1834. Its official address was “Commons, Rhode Island.” It was still a commons, but one that had been subdivided in new ways.

I visit the Commons fairly frequently, both public and private sides, to buy a dump permit from the town hall, attend an event at the Community Center (in the old Grange Hall), visit the library, or eat at Commons Lunch. When last I visited, I took a good look at just what was common—what was still public—about the Commons today. What does commons mean, in our era of privatization?

There’s still much about the Commons that is held in common. The property is still owned by the town, except for the plot where the church stands, which is now owned by the church. There are government institutions: the town hall, school, and post office. Much of the land is occupied by the town burying ground, which also includes the town’s war memorials. All of this reflects, in a modern way, that sense of shared purpose that goes back to the Plymouth Colony.

Where that starts to change is in the new additions to the public domain. The Commons has been extended to include a large area for public recreation, including a soccer field, tennis courts, and playgrounds. These are on town-owned land and are maintained by the town government. But, as with so many recent public amenities, these facilities are actually public-private partnerships, dependent on donated funds and volunteer labor for construction.

The town library, on the other side of the Commons, is another example of this public-private duality. It’s actually the Brownell Library, bequeathed to the “people of Little Compton” by Pardon Brownell, a “generous citizen, whose ancestral roots are deeply fastened in the community,” in 1921. (The existing town library was combined with it 40 years later.) The Brownell Trust maintains the building; taxpayers fund staffing, books, and supplies; and a separate nonprofit group supports programs.

This public-private framework means that decisions about community are made by segments of the community, those who care most, or have the time or funds to support their interests, and not by the town as a whole. Many of the organizations that support community life are nonprofits. They might receive a small amount of government support, but also do a great deal of private fundraising.

The Village Improvement Society, just off the Commons, was founded in 1914 by Georgiana Bowen Withington, a wealthy summer resident, to help the town “develop along the lines so carefully drawn by the wise first settlers.” It was not to be a charity, but “an effort to stimulate the people to get for themselves the good things of life,” established by “leading citizens” but open to all. The Community Center, established in 1993 to provide “educational, social, and cultural programming for the enrichment of the community,” fundraises to support after-school activities, a summer camp, and other programs. There’s a Senior Citizens Center, sharing the building with the Grange.

Does the Commons still serve as a commons? I think it does. It’s still the place for official government work: elections, town meetings, and committee meetings. It’s where citizens go to interact with town offices, or attend the annual town meeting. It’s the place for other kinds of community, too, both the kind supported by nonprofits and those that form at restaurants and coffee shops. It also serves as the location for grassroots politics: the Sakonnet Peace Alliance has held vigils in “peaceful witness against war and violence” at the Commons every Sunday since 2003. The Commons, as community space, still does important work.

There are also other common spaces, beyond the Commons, in my town, and I set out to visit them all to see if their history might help explain the changing meaning of commons.

Public access to the shore is a hot issue in any seaside town, and it’s been contentious in Little Compton since its founding. That first division of land included a very small lot for a “herring ware,” a commonly owned stone structure for catching fish when they ran in the spring. And the shores of the rivers and ocean that bound Little Compton would have been public, for fishing—that was in Rhode Island’s Royal Charter. Locating the shoreline, and determining what activities were allowed, has been fought in courts for centuries.

In 1796, the town arranged with a major landowner to secure a new common space. In exchange for a road to his farm at the harbor, William Rotch granted town residents access to the harbor, agreeing to let them collect sand and seaweed, build wharfs, and keep boats there. Through the farm and road have gone through many changes of ownership, and many legal battles, the public access remains. Today, the southernmost part of that property is called Lloyd’s Beach, and a sign grudgingly allows town residents to enjoy it. A guard is posted in the summer, to keep out-of-towners out. The citizens of 1796 would no doubt be pleased that public access remains, but never could have foreseen the new uses and meanings the Commons they established would take.

The Sakonnet River, which borders Little Compton on the west, tells another story through two public access points to its waters, Town Way and Taylor’s Lane. These were once points where ferries provided access to Newport, across the river. Roads that once led to wharves became roads to access the rocky shore for fishing and swimming. These are unmarked and hard to discover. They aren’t secret, exactly, though maybe folks are happy if people who don’t already know about them don’t find out. Small towns can be like that.

Another point of access to the shore introduces a new era of the Commons: public spaces donated to the town by wealthy residents. In 1949 Hester Simmons willed Town Landing, a lovely, if rocky, oceanfront property, to the town. (Rumor has it that she did so to spite a neighbor.) It was one of several gifts the town received at midcentury from wealthy residents. Elizabeth Mason Lloyd offered Wilbour Woods, a park. Sophie Wheeler gave the town a ball field in the village of Adamsville. These philanthropists assumed that the town was the proper owner of property held for the public. The town had to promise to care for the property—something that it has struggled to do in recent years. The publicly owned commons only works if the town has the will, and the finances, to support it.

Perhaps that is why local residents in recent years have turned to more private ways of creating public lands. The Sakonnet Preservation Association, a private, nonprofit land trust, was founded in 1972 to “promote the preservation of natural resources in the Town of Little Compton, including water resources, marshland, swamps, woodland and open spaces.” It receives property or a conservation easement by gift and protects it from development. A few properties are public, open to hikers and nature lovers; most are closed to the public, conserving properties of environmental interest, or viewsheds, sometimes to the benefit of those who donated them. The Nature Conservancy, a national organization, also holds lands and easements in town, including two of the most used “public” parks in town.

Land trusts are private solutions to a public concern, but they come with public costs: the tax deductions for donations, and the removal of land from the tax rolls. And, of course, there was no “commons” in the decision-making. Decisions about which land to preserve has been privatized—given to the donating landowners and the associations who accepted their gifts. These undeveloped properties appear to be commons, but they are free of the messy local democracy and taxes that actually bind commons and community together. They’re a privatized commons.

A park just down the street from my house with the ungainly name of the Simmons Mill Pond Management Area suggests that there’s still a role for government to play in creating public space. State owned, the area encompasses some 500 acres of woods that are managed by the Department of Environmental Management for hunting and fishing. A public-private partnership made the purchase possible in 1995; a major local foundation, the Champlin Foundation, provided some of the funding. On the other side of town, there’s another state property, with a boat ramp into the harbor—done in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy. Both of these projects also received federal funds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program–supported by a special tax on motorboat fuel and fishing and hunting equipment. Public, but a narrow slice of public. The Commons is increasingly complicated, splintered.

My visits to these commons gave me a new appreciation for my town. Spending time in all of these various public spaces made the town feel like it was home in a way it hadn’t before. Learning the history of those places helped me understand something important about what it means to belong. I appreciated both the public and private groups and the individuals who made possible these public and natural spaces for me to enjoy. But the visits also made me worry about the changing meaning of commons, privatization, and the lack of transparency in decision-making, as well as the lack of government support for places so important to creating community. These beaches, these parks, and even that old burying ground on the Commons, once the sturdy embodiment of our collective ideals, now feel as fragile as the concept itself.

The post In Search of ‘the Commons’ in Modern America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is the self-consciousness of the idea of Main Street—from its origins in a Nathaniel Hawthorne sketch of New England, to Walt Disney’s construction of a Main Street USA, to the establishment of ersatz Main Streets in today’s urban malls—that makes it so essentially American. Main Street has been used in myriad ways to describe very many different things—from the crushing power of convention to the thrill of new entertainment, from the small town to new big city neighborhoods.

Main Street’s meaning could change quickly. In the 1920s, to invoke Main Street was to call up an image of the dullness of provincial life. By the 1930s, Main Street represented the bedrock of America’s embattled democracy. For decades, Main Street stood for the local; today it’s an importable model of planning and development that can be set up almost anywhere.

Main Street bears double political meanings that in turn raise complicated questions about whether the United States lives up to its ideals.

As public space, the American Main Street has always represented an ideal of community, where persons from different surrounding neighborhoods and social classes come together as rough equals. But Main Street also has a history of discriminatory practice going back more than a hundred years. Northern “sundown towns” in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century policed their Main Streets by warning and expelling anyone who didn’t “belong” after the sun went down. And historically Main Street usually has been defined by the ruling class of the area, with outsiders—by class, ethnicity, religion, color—not particularly welcome.

So even as we celebrate the ideal of Main Street as a space of democratic equality, we should remember—and rue—the reality.

Part of the reality is this: America’s small towns and their Main Streets have died a thousand deaths, but Main Streets also live on and multiply now as never before, as we recreate them in wealthy suburbs and big cities. Over the past 20 years, America has seen the growth of ersatz Main Streets, facsimiles of the real thing, in private shopping places everywhere.

The Main Street of Springfield, Mass. in 1905. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As the malls of America have become deserted, those shopping centers still clinging to life have strived to emulate the amenities of what they had rendered obsolete: Main Street. They have installed benches, street lamps, grassy areas, and even band stands, providing the feel of public space in the open air, the feel of a community. These facsimiles of Main Street, creations of commercial landscape architects, can be more successful than actual Main Streets, since the national retail brands in ersatz Main Street attract shoppers in the massive numbers needed to make a public space seem genuinely “public.”

If we prefer the authentic to the ersatz, then this new Main Street poses a challenge to the original article. What’s the best response to such a challenge? To do what the ersatz Main Street can’t: provide the individualized shops and restaurants that you won’t find in the ersatz space. The real Main Street also must work harder to draw in people from outside the community, with street fairs and festivals, art galleries, craft shops, and other one-of-a-kind attractions.

Meanwhile, the ersatz Main Street carries its own double meaning: It represents a corporate usurpation of the idea of Main Street—and also an expansion of the idea. Indeed, since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, Main Street has taken on a broader meaning and wider constituency than it ever before possessed. It is not just small businesses that Main Street represents. The phrase has become a substitute for what we all share, the American commons. We are either Main Street or its opposite, Wall Street. In this polarized time, we belong to one pole or the other.

One paradox is that the public space of Main Street, regulated spaces that must be open to all, may be harder to police than the ersatz Main Streets, which are private spaces where certain standards of decorum can be swiftly enforced. We don’t usually notice the limitations on our behavior in private spaces, but they exist, often in a sign posted as you enter the space.

Is it possible that the private space of the ersatz Main Street, which welcomes shoppers of all religions and colors, is a more hospitable space than the public space of Main Street? Is the private Main Street more tolerant of difference (as long as you keep your shirt on and wear shoes) than the public space of warring statues and demonstrators armed with torches or guns, where intimidation can be masked as self-defense? If this is the case, it argues for the democracy of the marketplace, which embraces anyone, regardless of creed or color, who has the money to make a purchase.

Today, Main Street faces what some see as an existential threat: e-commerce, which has made any physical shopping space increasingly a luxury. The real Main Street has a future in this digitally dominated marketplace—it is not competing with e-commerce—but the ersatz Main Streets of malls may have more to worry about. Will they evolve as hybrid showrooms where consumers can touch the merchandise before buying it cheaper online? Or as places to pick up merchandise ordered in advance and delivered locally? Or will e-commerce fall victim to its own success and be defeated by Main Street—the infinity of choices and merchandise reviews consuming so much of the shopper’s time that it’s simpler to just go shopping in a store with limited, pre-selected, merchandise?

If Main Street means anything today, it signifies an idealized space where American society can practice its highest values, which include civility, tolerance, and yes, commerce. And Main Street’s endurance, as an idea, demonstrates the authority of myth to nurture a sense of community, even in a society as fragmented as ours.

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These prices remained the same until 1976. As late as 1997, the last full year Walter’s son Peter O’Malley owned the team before selling it to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Group, a box seat cost $12, and you could sit in the pavilions for $6.

In case you’re wondering, $3.50 in 1962 is the equivalent of $28 today. Good luck trying to buy a box seat at Dodger Stadium in 2017 for 28 bucks. If you want to see the Dodgers play the Giants this season from that seat location, you could be paying as much as $600 for the privilege. Present-day Dodger Stadium’s slogan might well be: “Welcome, fans. Bring money.”

But it was not always this way. The O’Malleys’ low ticket price strategy was part of a larger business plan, centered on getting as many repeat customers into their ballpark as possible. Like Disneyland, the theme park showplace that Dodgers executives visited and studied, Dodger Stadium would feature affordable prices that would attract families, and especially women and children. Once they were through the turnstiles and “in the building,” these families would spend money on concessions—lots and lots of Dodger Dogs—as well as all manner of Dodger logo branded souvenirs to be worn, waved, and displayed.

Most important of all was the atmosphere inside the stadium. Beautiful views of downtown and the mountains. Organ music. Friendly and efficient park employees. Cleanliness. Safety. Fan greetings on the scoreboards. Promotions. Autograph and picture days. Not to mention Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Steve Garvey, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and eight National League pennants in the stadium’s first quarter century of operation.

Dodger Stadium was privately owned, which meant the O’Malleys bore all risks but reaped all rewards—which also let them play the long game. If say, a six-year-old could visit the stadium with his family and have an experience that would make him want to come back again, the seeds would be planted for a lifetime of patronage and profit. “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” runs the famous Jesuit aphorism, and under O’Malley ownership from 1962 to 1997, the Dodger Stadium experience epitomized it.

This business model also served to make the stadium one of Los Angeles’ most inclusive and diverse public venues, since its affordable ticket prices drew fans from across racial, ethnic, and class lines. Club box and dugout level seating, which were class-exclusionary, represented only 3 to 4 percent of available ticketing options at Dodger Stadium in the 1960s. So if any institution in Los Angeles could be termed “democratic,” in the sense of offering the greatest good for the greatest number, it was Dodger Stadium during that time.

No one would call Dodger Stadium democratic today. It is not designed for repeat visitors, unless they are hedge fund managers or employees fortunate enough to get their hands on the company season tickets. The team, owned by Guggenheim, a financial services consortium, has gone upscale. It has spent more on players and stadium renovations, while also charging fans much more for tickets and parking. If you’re planning to come as a family, make sure your monthly rent or mortgage payment is covered first. Even a family of four that bought the cheapest tickets in the ballpark, along with four hot dogs and four drinks, would spend $134. The same family would spend approximately $120 for the same combination at a movie theater, where parking is often free.

The Dodger Stadium that tied a transient, race-and-class stratified city together is gone. Now, the chances that the fan in the seat next to you will be from the same social class and racial background are higher than ever.

In a 21st-century Los Angeles rife with income stagnation, racial separation, and social alienation, we need Dodger Stadium to return to its roots. The emphasis, as it was when the O’Malleys owned the team, needs to be on families and on children. Let kids under 14 in for half price. And give families a special discount. The money lost on the front end would be a fraction of what lifelong Dodger fans would spend over the years at their favorite stadium. A democratized Dodger Stadium would not solve all of the city’s problems, but every small, good thing counts in a time like this.

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