There is untapped power in public spaces to foster social connections. As our neighborhoods and our schools—the places where we normally make social connections—are becoming ever more income-segregated, cities all over the world are pursuing practical ways to spark connections using parks, markets, and other civic spaces that bring visitors from all walks of life together.
Carol Coletta, Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, is passionate about one particular promise among the many benefits of social connections: their potential to increase upward mobility by expanding people’s networks and opportunities. Coletta knows from experience that public spaces have a unique potential to foster social connections across class differences.
The question is, how do we activate this potential?
In her role as a Fellow, Coletta has been convening a community of practice: a braintrust of city leaders and researchers known for creating welcoming public spaces, and together, they’ve been designing and testing ways to invite social connections across class and other dimensions. Coletta came to this work after decades of investing in public spaces that encourage socioeconomic mixing. Prior to becoming a Fellow, she led Memphis River Parks Partnership to harness the transformative power of public parkland along the Mississippi River. The organization undertook the radical redesign of Tom Lee Park, an under-used 31-acre riverfront site that had potential to be a welcoming “hub” for all Memphians, given its proximity both to downtown and also to some of Tennessee’s poorest zip codes.
“We realized early that the geography gave us a rare opportunity to build public space where people with high incomes and people with low incomes might occupy it at the same time,” Coletta says. “But getting them to mix and form new networks—that would be an additional challenge. Co-presence is necessary but not sufficient for the meaningful interactions that make a difference. Frankly, we know more about designing for togetherness than we do about managing for togetherness.”
In the redesign of Tom Lee Park and continuing after it opened, the Partnership tested and iterated through design, operations, and programming the prompts that move people from sharing public space to connecting and engaging in a neighborly way. In the process, they learned how a public space can be transformed into what we now understand to be social infrastructure: the places and social networks that bring people together and help new relationships grow. Tom Lee Park was rebuilt to set expectations of neighborliness and to welcome Memphians from all walks of life while recognizing visitors’ diversity.
“We measured outcomes from our efforts, and the statistic that makes me the proudest is this: 64% of our park-goers said they met someone new in Tom Lee Park,” Coletta said. “Think about that. What if every public space could do that? Think about the increases in trust, community resilience, and opportunity we could expect. The potential pay-off for people and for communities is huge.”
Excited by what she learned at Tom Lee Park, along with other initiatives in her career, Coletta imagined a consortium of cities sharing a goal of public spaces spurring social connection across differences. That’s the genesis of the community of practice she leads today as a Fellow. Together, the partners are piloting new ideas, motivated by the opportunity and the urgent need to bridge socioeconomic differences.
Economist Raj Chetty and colleagues argue that ‘economic connectedness’—a form of social capital measuring how much high-income and low-income people interact with each other—is the strongest predictor of upward income mobility. Public spaces, if properly located, designed, managed, and programmed, are ideal venues for sparking this kind of economic connectedness by supporting networks of what sociologists call “weak ties.” Weak ties are the incidental social interactions you might have with, say, your fellow yoga class member or a competitor in a casual pick-up basketball game … in other words, chit-chats or unplanned interactions. These quick connections can deliver a strong sense of meaning with even minimal cues, like learning that you share a favorite song or birthday month. More importantly, weak ties can be instrumental in connecting people to jobs and resources.
How does this work? Picture what social scientists call “familiar strangers.” These are two people who, through chance encounters in a park over time, become more likely to say hello and interact on future occasions. One day, one of these brief but routine run-ins could include an exchange of information that leads one of the familiar strangers to a new job opening, changing their economic trajectory. Weak ties are powerful catalysts for economic mobility because their diffuse nature connects us to all different kinds of opportunities, and their transactional nature makes it easier for us to ask for or offer help. Over time, little moments of cross-class connection could well prove to be an economic engine for a city.
And so Coletta’s question is: Can public space serve as a seedbed for these kinds of small moments, muffling differences in demography or income and building bridges out of modest points of connection? She thinks so—and so do the city leaders she’s speaking with all over the country and world. The tougher question is how? How can the designers and operators of public spaces incorporate helpful reminders for visitors to look up, to look outward, to see each other, and to connect, if only for a moment?
“That’s the question our community of practice is actively trying to answer right now, and it’s not an answer you can look up in a book … yet!” Coletta said. “The only way to solve the how is through experimentation, good old-fashioned trial and error. So that’s what we’re doing.” The community of practice is piloting different interventions now, learning from both their successes and their failures. And coming soon, they plan to publish their discoveries so that other cities have practical resources to join in this important work.
