Transcript: The cost of losing our public spaces: from London to Lima

Onya: Public spaces like parks are increasingly becoming less accessible. This phenomenon, observable from London to Lima, affects how we socialise, engage in physical activities and participate in our communities. One reason for this lack of access is the commodification of these spaces but what are the consequences of charging a fee to access a park? Let’s compare 2 scenarios. Imagine you’re walking towards a park near your home. After a long day at work, there is no entrance fee. It’s simply enjoying a peaceful stroll into the woods.

Voice 1: It’s been such a long day, work can be overwhelming, but walking around this part of the park really helps to reduce my stress. This bench is my favourite spot. Listening to the words as the sun sets calls me I love it here. This place holds so many memories from running here with my neighbour to volunteering at community concerts. I come here almost every day. It’s like medicine. It makes me feel so good. I can’t imagine life without this space.

Onya: Now consider a different scenario.

Voice 2: This weekend I will pay to use the park. I need it to calm myself after so many demanding days at. Even if it means cutting other expenses, I really miss when the park was free, when I could meet my neighbours and even strangers without barriers. Now it feels more isolated. Many of my friends can’t afford it anymore, and even for me it’s becoming increasingly difficult to enjoy the park. I used to come here daily, but now I feel the financial strain.

Manolo: Public spaces impact our health, relationships and connection to nature. They bring together diverse people and foster social cohesion. However, some spaces are no longer as inclusive as they once were. In this episode Onya will speak with Nadir and Daniela, two Peruvian students from different universities who research parks and public spaces. Nadir, a student and UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity interviewed users of the Olympic Park in London gathering stories about the park’s significance and the connections it fosters. Daniela studied the negative effects of restricted access to public spaces.

Onya: Hi everyone, Onya here. Welcome to another episode of Life of PIE. I have two special guests today, Nadar Chioino. Nadir is an MSc PIE alumni and multidisciplinary designer with seven plus years of work experience designing for the financial, insurance and pensions industries. She currently works at Tesco as a senior UX designer. I also have Daniela Chung Dani’s a city planner, architect and designer from Lima, Peru. She completed her masters from MIT and is currently a part of the UN Habitat’s Planning, Finance and Economy section and Urban Lab Mesoamerica hub, where she focuses on projects regarding urban planning, dissipated tree processes, public space, and urban innovation. You can find out more about Nadir and Dani’s exciting work in the show notes. Welcome Nadir and Dani, it’s lovely to see you both.

Nadir: Thank you, Onya.

Daniela: Hi, thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

Onya: Great. So Nadir, how do you feel after submitting your dissertation?

Nadir: It feels great. I’m feeling amazing, although I had to go through a couple of life changes as well. Moving out of the flat, finding a job, but at this point everything has fallen into place, so luckily I’m feeling great and yeah, it’s been great to research and I’m really here to tell you more about about the work I’ve done.

Onya: Great. In your dissertation, you did a really interesting study on green spaces and well-being, with a focus on older adults. So you were looking at adults within the ages of 50 and 70. And Dani, your research nicely complements Nadir’s work and I’ll come to you shortly, but I’d like to start with Nadir. Could you tell us briefly what your research was about?

Nadir: Yeah. So since I knew I was going to be spending a lot of time researching this subject, I figured that I should spend time in something that really meant a lot for me, and I’ve always been someone that enjoyed spending time in green spaces like I try to go away on hikes and just being close to nature in general makes me feel good, and I’ve lived in a city my whole life, so it’s important for me to have like those sort of like breeding spaces. So with this, I was starting to think that I wanted to understand how public green spaces in cities affected peoples well-being.

So being here in London, I quickly decided that I wanted to base my case study in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which is right here around Stratford and since I was studying at the IGP as well, I was very drawn to the prosperity research that was being done in East London and it makes sense to continue the efforts. It was quite interesting for me because at first before narrowing down the sample and knowing who I was going to be interviewing. I got in contact with several organisations that could link me to any participant that frequently visited the park, so I contacted around 20 of them and I think the ones that were more, more excited to work with me were the park champions and they happen to be the volunteers of the park and it turned out that the people that were more interested in participating as well were the older adults, so they all were very excited to take part in the research. So everything started to take shape and it was even more it made even more sense because there is a trend of global organisation which is rising and at the same time the longevity of the world’s population is increasing. However, what’s what doesn’t really make sense is that for many older people that are living in cities, these additional years of life are normally in poor health, and they are socially isolated. So based on this context, I decided the two main research questions that I wanted to answer.

The main one was, in which ways do green spaces contribute to the well-being of the elderly, elderly volunteers in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and also which areas of the park are their favourites? How do each of them makes them feel and how they choose to interact with those spaces?

So that’s basically what I wanted to study and then I can tell you more about the main findings a bit later. But that’s that’s the research in a nutshell basically.

Onya: Thanks, Nadir. That was really interesting and I knew that your topic, which you probably are avoiding mentioning, is the synergistic effects of place based well-being. And I also know that Dani’s work is the dark side of all of this, which is quite exciting and I want to bring Dani in so the way that we’re going to do this is I’m going to try to weave sort of like a thread bringing you and Dani together and allow your work to complement each other as opposed to doing it sequentially.

So, Dani, I’m gonna ask you to come in now and tell us, what was your work about? What’s this dark side of green spaces?

Daniela: Yeah. So there is a dark side as Nadir was saying, like, how open public spaces can really benefit the community or a city. However, my research was focused in Lima, Peru, where I live, and I think my attraction to open public spaces is the same like it just means you good, you know in my case it wasn’t necessarily focused on green spaces because also Lima is a desert, so we don’t have like a lot of green spaces. But just like open public spaces more generally, and what I focused on was how with different case studies a lot of public spaces where, and sadly, they’re still being privatised in different ways by different actors. It doesn’t need to be like one specific actor, it’s both from, like any person, it can be from the government, it can be by the private sector as well. And this is how they are. I called my thesis dispossessing the public. It’s like taking away the world of public space and just leaving space and it’s being private.

It’s like that way of how counterproductive having public spaces that are just closed or are used by specific sectors of the population really going against what public space should be about, you know, encounter, social cohesion, civil society, everybody you know having a well-being connecting to Nadir, making it good from a public health approach as well, so it has lots of benefits and in Lima now more specifically, there’s also an issue of an inequitable distribution in the territory. So for example, the richer areas in Lima have more open public spaces, have more green spaces, whether the more poorer areas in Lima have fewer. So in on top of these, you know, in an equitable situation public spaces are being privatised. My whole research is about understanding who is privatising, what are the ways that people are privatising and of course, what are the consequences about it?

I find three different typologies of the way that public spaces can be privatised and making the case that really anyone can be the person who privatises. But the role of local governments is really important to stopping this and to making you know the difference on this matter.

Onya: Thank you for that. It’s such an important issue and I think what Nadia’s work will do in this episode is highlighting the importance of these public spaces, even though she focuses on green spaces in particular, I want to find out before we dive into the findings. I know you used an interesting methodology. How did you do this study?

Nadir: Yeah, I think my favourite part of the study was actually conducting the interviews. Uh, and being there with.

The park champion so I guess I already kind of like spoiled myself, but it was qualitative research. Basically, there are several quantitative studies at the time that really evidence that impact that green spaces have, especially as well in healthy ageing but, umm, what they didn’t mention is that sometimes there is more to green spaces than just the nature.

So since I wanted to understand what well-being was for a particular typology of people that were the volunteers, it didn’t make sense for me to actually just tell them. OK, I’m gonna interview you in in, I don’t know online or whatever. So it needed to be in the space that I wanted to to get that information from the data, right, so I talked to my supervisor and we found out that the best method that I could actually do this was by performing go alongs and semi structured interviews. So go along is just a fancy way of calling it when you actually go to the place where you’re going to be performing the research. The problem that I told my participants was okay let’s just take a relaxed walk and I want to go with you to the places in the park that you enjoy the most. And I’m just gonna be asking you a couple of questions. Right. So I have the guide with me. I also had a recorder. I also had a GPS tracker so that I could know exactly where we were going.

I was kind of like an octopus. I was also taking pictures at the time recording, taking notes. So it was a wild thing to do as only one person, I would say. But yeah, I  think that even though I  walked like 15 times through the same places because like the majority of them really enjoyed spending time in some particular places in the park. Every time I visited the same place with them, but with different participant the story that I got out of the place was completely different so that was fascinating and that was something that that really made me very excited as a researcher because it takes into consideration this method that there are different perspectives and different perceptions of reality. And also your perception is put it into the same place, and that’s also influenced by your own memories and your own ways of seeing the world.

So that to me was just wonderful because, like, I don’t know, it might be just a bench, like taking shape and becoming the place where they spend time with their, I don’t know, like their spouses or just helping out someone in the park. so that was fascinating, honestly. I would say that there was a method that really was ideal for me to get the data that I wanted.

Onya: Interesting. And I’m going to ask you something n before we dive into that. What’s one quote that really stood out for you when you were doing these walk alongs or these walking interviews?

Nadir: Yeah, I think I think that the sometimes I would say the downside of using this method is that sometimes I don’t know when you’re working with someone I don’t know a part of your brain just activates and you just feel like relaxed and also they felt very comfortable with me so I guess that at one point and this, this was the point that really stuck with me was that I was working with one of the participants and she just basically told me that just talking to me, she realised the importance of the work that she was doing there at the park and how being surrounded by such lovely people and such an amazing space. She realised that she was unhappy at work and this was this was actually the only participant that I talked to that wasn’t actually that. That was working at the time. So yeah, she she basically told me that the park had allowed her to actually discovered that she didn’t want to be a part of that job anymore and that she was going to quit. So I think that space actually contrasted how she was feeling and realised that it was not normal to feel bad all the time in her work and as well another participant. She also shared with me lovely memories that she had with her mom before she passed away. It was really interesting because we were looking at the at the canal and the water that was running over there and it was beautiful because she was telling me about photography and the light and all of that. And then she remembered her.

And like it was this contrast of the beauty with the grief that she was feeling at the time, and how the space actually helped her to process and move forward with that grief. So it got quite intense, I’m gonna say. And I mentioned that this could potentially sometimes be a downside if you’re not really equipped with the techniques of interviewing cause it can get into a grey area where you have to be really careful with the ethical agreements, right? And also just reassure participants that they’re gonna be fine and they can also withdraw from the conversation if they would like to, right? So it’s an important thing to take into consideration as well.

Onya: Of course. Thank you for that. Now let’s dive into what were are your main findings? I mean, I know it and I’m excited to talk about that cell diagram that you had on how you use the prosperity flower. So talk to us about the findings.

Nadir: Yeah. So as you said, I’ve been reading the title of the dissertation because the title is a mouthful, and that’s basically what the research is all about and it’s very condensed but before I actually, yeah, tell you about the title is that the main findings of this study and I’m going to repeat myself as well a lot and just double click on what I’m saying is that based well-being in green spaces for older adults allows for nature connection, volunteering opportunities and social engagement in this particular space that was Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which overall contributes to healthy ageing. So all of this that I just I just mentioned is what I called the synergetic effects of place based well-being and social engagement in green spaces for older adults, so I know it’s a lot and I’m ready to unpack it.

So if we go back to what I was really trying to understand was exactly what well-being was for these people in this particular space. So I got the answer and it was an answer that I wasn’t actually expecting. I was just expecting them to tell me that green spaces were great. They were in contact with nature, but it was more than. So for them actually well-being is a multifaceted complex and ever changing construct, which means that it’s alive, just like nature, right. So based on this data, I created this framework or this cell that you were mentioning. So what I actually wanted to depict was how all of this well-being was put into a green space which is the park and how that particular place created like an ecosystem? Because again, it’s a living thing of overlapping and mutually enhancing domains. And this is where it gets interesting because these domains that actually were social engagement, health and volunteering. They interact with each other. All of these four components interact with each other to create an understanding of what base based well-being is.

Onya: I actually want to ask what do you mean by social engagement? Yeah. What do you mean by health?

Nadir: Yeah. Perfect. So I think we we really discussed the importance of the green space when I mentioned that it’s place based. I really want to emphasise that the experiences that these people have in this particular space, it’s really rooted to where they are, so it’s not easy for us to just like kind of like copy and paste their experiences and just generalise all of that into another park. So the reason why the green space is also very important is because Stratford was completely regenerated, right? So most of the people that I talked to during my research, they think livers of the surrounding areas, so it’s very interesting because they’ve grown with these changes as well and they’ve become really linked to this particular place. So in a way they felt kind of like guardians as well, and it’s a very important place for them since, they already feel rooted to this, to this space and they have been neighbours and been coming to this park for, I think 92% of them were park champions for at least five years but some of them were living in the area for 10 years, so that’s just the context on the place itself. And yeah, the most important finding that I actually discovered, which really impacted me was that yeah, nature was important. The space was important. But what they got out of being in contact with people in the park. It was really just fascinating for them because uh, when you tend to grow older like you leave your job, you kind of like, feel purposeless, a little bit. There’s a really like a 360, kind of like change in your life. So they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Going into a park provided them with this sense of direction, purpose as well as opportunities for socialisation. And if you’ve ever been to the park itself, it’s is there something new going all the time? It’s not like a regular park.

You’ve got, like different football events or sporting events or you’ve got a concert going on. So there’s a lot of things always happening and a lot of people are always engaging with them with each other.  So the fact that they were engaging with people as well as volunteering at the same time, it actually allowed them to feel less socially isolated, they weren’t feeling lonely anymore, and even the depression that they were feeling in some cases cause they did mention that it started to subside. So that was that was fascinating to me as well.

So that’s on the side of the social engagement of the cell that I was describing and the framework that I created.

Onya: If I could I want to bring Dani in at this time. Nadir just touched on the social engagement. So the chance to meet other people and interact with other people. And she highlighted at the start the older citizens, for example, perhaps the spouse has passed away and they have this the challenge of loneliness. So we see the benefits of this public space allowing for engagement with other people.

So, Dani, I’m wondering in your study where you find that dispossessing happening and all you have is space. How is that lack of space or lack of access to the spaces impacting on the people?

Daniela: Yeah, so I think it’s just dispossessing from all those benefits that the public space can bring, right. And there’s a lot on, like health, like mental health, but also physical space, for example, right. If the street is unsafe, for example, because of transportation and so on, you can do sports on a park, in a park, or you can go running or like there’s also that physical space aspect that if you see it at a city scale, it’s from a public health perspective as well, not just at the individual scale, right. And there’s also impact on, for example economic development or economic inclusion because an active public space that is with a lot of people that has a high quality can also bring value to new economic activities and bring value to the neighbourhood as well. And that, you know, brings a lot of benefits in in different ways. So if you prove that they think that in a way you are taking away all those.

It’s from an individual perspective on the people and the family and children as well, because they cannot go to play at the park or like elderly people as well. Then you’re going against all those things, right? Even from a maybe, even a sustainability or urban resilience perspective as well, because if you have a green public space that has a lot of shaded area in the neighbourhood that is like a lot of concrete and pavement, and you have a heat island effect. Maybe it can provide some benefits to the area around it, but also within the park. If you’re privatising it and not letting people in. Then that’s gonna bring other as well problems in terms of the heat island effect or health in general, right?

Those are like the problems and that’s why my research and findings were we should definitely stop privatising and do policies that allows us to stop it and in my findings also this stop it mechanisms where normally bottom up it was the people who lived around who are trying to stop it in a way. So it’s again, I think, linked to what Nadir is saying. No, bringing together people and knowing and being really conscious of the benefits of public space is and being a collective force that can really stop the privatisation because you are aware of the good that it brings to you and also it’s right because in the end these public spaces, the ones that I studied at least, are government owned.

So it’s public land and it’s being privatised so it’s like I’m paying my taxes. This should be maintained with my taxes but then I’m not allowed to go in. I’m not allowed to get all those benefits from my well-being from my taxes, so it’s very I mean concerning to say the least.

Onya: Those are some really great points that you highlighted, Dani, but I want to ask, what do you mean by heat island effect?

Daniela: Yeah, the heat island is an effect that we’re seeing to the increase in temperatures worldwide because of climate change, but also because of heat waves for different phenomenons. For example, we’re experiencing one right now in Lima. There are studies that cities and urban areas are experiencing worst increasing temperatures. And this is because in cities there are more people. So there is more energy produced, industries, more concrete and more materials that absorb this heat.

So there’s an increase in in temperatures and even within cities, there are areas that are warmer than others because they don’t have green spaces, they don’t have shade, they don’t have trees and so on. So these, they call heat island because they are creating like a heat island in an urban area or within an urban area. And this is something that we are experiencing all over the world.

Onya: Got it. So these pockets, so they’re like pockets of heat around the city

Daniela: Exactly.

Onya: The other question I had is when you see privatisation, can you give us some examples of what these spaces are being used for?

Daniela: Yes. So in my thesis I found by studying different case studies, I also did a qualitative approach like Nadir of interviewing all these different actors that were dispossessing that were dispossessed and understanding like the different ways that this could happen to really like grasp  how we could stop?

And the first one that I found, I called it a concession for development and it’s normally when a public space is being rented or conceded to a private entity with the excuse of bringing more improvement or development to the area.

One of my case studies was a public park in a poor neighbourhood that was not in great condition, but still it was part of the neighbourhood. I think almost 70% of the park was privatised by conceding it to a private company that would put a football grass sport there and they charge people to enter and to use it. So now the public and the people in the neighbourhood that had their park, even if it wasn’t in great condition, just had, like, a strip of public space that they could use. And then the other park was just like closed, you know, so that’s a very tangible aspect. And then if I talked to the municipality, even in my interviews, and they were saying like ohh, but this public space wasn’t in good condition. The money that we get from that rent, we’re going to invest it in improving, you know the public space that was left and so on but you don’t even see any benefit from that in the end and a lot of these cases there’s like underlying corruption with some issues like those, but that’s one for example, another one, the second one was.

I called it appropriation for livelihood, and this was more a bottom-up strategy where people just appropriated public land or public space and this happens in the outskirts of Lima for building houses, for example. Or also I had a case study of a very busy neighbourhood in Lima called Gamara, where the streets were being rented like one square metre of the street was being rented because there was so much potential for selling goods that people just paid daily to be on that space in the street so that they could sell their goods, you know. But still, I mean, it’s not letting people use the street in a in a public way or in a in a way that it should be.

And the third one was enclosure for control. That’s that’s how I called it. And it’s public space that it’s being closed and the access is restricted with the excuse of providing safety or with the excuse of saying that it’s easier to manage when it’s closed and I think it’s similar to the case that you were telling me at the beginning of our conversation, right? We have these huge parks in Lima, there’s the most biggest parks that we have in the outskirts of Lima and they are completely closed to the city, so there’s no even integration like it’s just a wall. It doesn’t provide any access to it. And then that two or three doors that it has, you have to pay a fee to enter.

Normally these park season are in in neighbourhoods that have lower resources. So it’s not, I mean people love to go there. The people that I interview because there’s like really good maintenance, they have like a lot of different services inside and they say like no, well, I can pay it, you know, like I like to go. But the thing is that they shouldn’t be needing to pay to get those services, you know, and being able to pay, it’s like the ability to spend some money is not letting them also go like every day for example, you know, they go once a month because they cannot pay to go every day and they should be able to go every day with their kids and you know, these are the kind of things that are happening and we’re just normalising that because they’re saying like, oh, we need the money for maintenance. So it’s just easy to control when you have two specific entrances instead of just making it all available to, to access.

Onya: That’s really interesting, Dani, and it just brings me back to Nadir because she was talking about how her participants, they’ve been volunteering in these green spaces for about 5 to 10 years, am I right? And some of them, like the participant you talked about when I asked you about a quote, you talked about the shared memory of a parent that passed away. So they have more access to these spaces and from these findings we see the benefits that having easy access regular access actually gives. So I want to delve to the intersection between your key, the main, the big things that there are in your cell, so you have social engagement, you have health, you have volunteering, but social engagement intersects with health in that space, you have positive emotions. Can you talk a little bit about this?

Nadir: Yeah, definitely. I put positive emotions between social engagement and health because like overall, after having worked with them and and getting to know them more and their experiences and when I was going through the data in the end, because they are going there at least twice or even people were going there daily once again, like the park, kind of like becomes their identity in a way, and I think that Dani might be able to touch upon this a bit further. It really helps kind of like the social surveillance because like the space is open.

Then you’re not seeing a lot of security around the park, although you have the cameras. Got people there, but since the park champions are feeling that the park is part of their identity and it’s something so important to them, they feel the need to protect it, right? So they feel kind of like in charge of the people that are going there.

They want people to have a good time. They want people to find the park to be safe, to be clean as well. So I think when you are privatising, you’re kind of assuming that by closing spaces down, you’re actually making them safer, but in the end you’re actually not doing that because you’re preventing people from interacting with each other and people from all different backgrounds. And I think the magic of spending time in in a public space, it’s that it’s open to the public, and that’s what the black champions were saying, like volunteering helps them to get in touch with so many different people from so many different backgrounds and actually be part of activities that they never would have thought that they could be part of.

Like for example, even like the start of the Olympics, right, or participating and helping out in a concert or just like being there in a community fair that was going on. So definitely all of that just generates positive emotions. And as humans, we are drawn to feeling good. No one wants to go to the space to feel bad. So since they feel good they want to continue going there and spending their time there, and there’s something that I also want to briefly touch upon is that I think a lot of time has been kind of like focused on just preventing disease, but if you start touching into like for example more most of like the change that we’re starting to see is that health is not only just preventing not only curing disease. I mean it’s also preventing it.

If you want to go a step further, it’s actually you want to be able to flourish, right? And to like be living in your best possible capacity. So I think that and I also discovered that these green spaces were doing this for the people, they were allowing them to live their best possible lives and they were actually helping them to be healthy, not only in body because they were moving a lot around that most of them were very mobile despite their age, but also being in in contact with the people and volunteering and in nature it lowered their stress levels. It made them feel happy and it made them feel like they had a purpose. It was wonderful to see honestly. Like, I never expected to see that when I started the research.

Onya: So I’m going to go back to the beginning where you mentioned when you first started the study, you thought that, you know, you wanted to find out, well, what’s the link between green spaces and well-being? And you thought people would come back and say, well, yes, it’s nature. Sure, you found something more nuanced, more elaborate. If I can use that word as opposed to just to yes, go to your nearest park and just look around at the trees. There’s more to it. And that’s what you highlight in the work. Now I’d like to ask, what are the implications of this? Who should intervene? Who should be involved in in making change?

Nadir: Yeah, I think that my results actually highlighted the importance of promoting and understanding well-being as something that’s holistic and that can happen in a green urban setting or that can happen in any public space as Dani will probably tell you as well and the fact that these spaces are sometimes overlooked or they are not even protected is something that’s very concerning because, as Dani was also mentioning, sometimes people just think that it’s okay to be paying for these services when you shouldn’t actually. I also feel that using these spaces can also bring a lot of benefit for the wide population and as well it helps to promote healthy ageing to take place and it provides a lot of opportunity for people to improve their quality of life after retirement.

You shouldn’t be paying anything. It’s free. Like all of this is free, and it’s available to people so I really want to highlight the importance of this and the importance of also creating the conditions for making these spaces even better and volunteering as I found out it’s also a way of doing this, or even just having different communities that are continuously meeting in parks or in public spaces can also accentuate that feeling. Also something else that I think that would be interesting to say is that, I mean, we could even turn this framework that I provided actually even quantify for some of the people that are interested and are good at the at the quantitative research, you could, you could actually turn this into metrics and be able to measure like how much of these different things are present in a particular space. So yeah, I think that governments should take part in protecting these spaces and also encouraging people to go out there and use them because here in the UK as well, sometimes it’s becoming more common if you’re feeling unwell and they really don’t know what to actually do with you in terms of health conditions. Or even just the mental health issues. There’s something here called social prescribing, which is they prescribe you to go to a public space, mainly a green area or even to volunteer. So it’s becoming a bit more common here as well. In order to prevent disease and just allow you to flourish as a human being.

Onya: Thank you Nadir, I actually thought about the Blue Zone. I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary on Netflix where they studied these different parts of the world where people are centenarians. So you have people over a hundred living longer and some of them spent time in their gardens. Some of them are walking, they’re socialising. It’s quite like what you described and it links to that point about healthy ageing where and the older population are ageing in a way that is graceful and it’s not a case of being lonely finding someone alone in their home passed away in their home, and the only reason why we know that they’ve died is because the neighbour hasn’t seen them for a couple of so it’s not that scenario now based on what you described. So I want to ask Dani, what are your thoughts in terms of the implications of your study?

Daniela: I’ll explain from my findings what the implications of privatisation are because then we can turn them around and understand, you know, what would be the implications of not privatising public space.

I found that there was a vicious cycle between the phenomenon of privatisation and their consequences at the city scale. If you privatise more, the consequences are reducing open public spaces that are accessible for everyone. But you’re also creating social and spatial fragmentation at a city scale between society, but also especially because you’re just preventing access to those spaces in the city. To go to privatisation, to those consequences, there are two important things that I found from my study.

One is that there’s this lack of awareness of the importance of public spaces, right? When it was also saying, like normalising, paying to access for a nice public space is just this lack of awareness that it’s my right to actually access one, but then also it’s more than citizenship or creating citizens, it’s creating consumers and clients in the city. You’re the client of that park and it’s a public space and it’s owned by the government so it’s when you start to see it that way it’s crazy. And then on the other way around from the consequences that, I mean when they are deep and let’s say or these consequences of these reduction of public spaces, social and spatial fragmentation, they deepen then what happens is that there’s more individualisation and differentiation because you’re not accessing, you’re not meeting people like in Nadir’s study, you’re not seeing people from all over the different parts of the city that are so different to you that you can normalise just being together in in the public space, which is what should be happening now.

There’s this fragmentation that increases even more, but there’s also the normalisation that there should be an economic benefit somehow of a public space. So it’s crazy and that’s why I think it should be stopped right because the other way around, we’re fostering the citizenship, this social cohesion, this integration at the social and spatial level as well.

I think, yeah, those are my thoughts and of course the recommendations that that I was providing in my thesis was at all those levels, right. There’s like at the policy level and the government level because I found that the local governments have a really important role in privatisation. They’re ignoring or endorsing for a decision in some way, and there should, they should be the ones that are actually controlling it. There’s not even data about how many of these cases are happening in Lima because we don’t know, it was just more for me hearing to be hearing people about it or, you know, interviewing people. And they were telling me like, oh, this is in her case somewhere else. But I don’t even know how many cases like this there are. So the national policy framework, for example, we have only, I think, one law right now about public space and what their role is and so on. So how can we even protect it when there’s not even at the nation scale.

I love it says that it’s good for you because it improves your well-being and it improves your health, right. And then of course at the local level as well in terms of the government role and so on, but also at the level of like society and civil society, right? Like not normalising this phenomenon and just strengthening the role of public space at a more city scale level and not just, you know, like individual experience.

Onya: Thank you very much, Dani. Thank you so much Nadir for this great study. Both of you and it’s interesting how you have these complementary studies, different locations and I really enjoyed it because you can see on the one hand the benefits of these spaces and on the other hand, you can see the disadvantages and sort of the consequences of not having these spaces, which is why I love this particular episode. And thank you both so much for joining us. And who knows, we might call on you again, both of you at the same time. For another follow up episode. I always say that but I don’t get away with it but thank you both for coming anyway and thanks everyone for listening. Bye.
 

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