The Public Commons: Building public spaces that actually serve the public

0:00This message comes from AT &T. Staying connected matters. That's why AT &T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT &T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com slash guarantee for details. Hey, it's Manoush. We still have not figured out how to use social media without it turning into, well, a mess. We're at the point where Congress is considering banning TikTok. Twitter is now X and beholden to whatever Elon Musk wants. And Meta, well, it hopes we will make friends with the AI chatbots it's deploying across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and threads.

0:48But what do we, the users, actually want? Can these platforms truly serve us, be our virtual public squares? We tackle these questions in our 2021 episode called Public Commons. It is packed with big ideas that will make you think differently the next time you go online. So get ready to stretch your brain and enjoy. Thanks for listening. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

1:35You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zomorodi. And as we begin to gather again in parks, city centers, or at school, I've been wondering, why do we want to meet in certain places but not others? What do the best public places have in common? The first thing that I think of is safety. And the second thing is creativity. And when we are in spaces where we can be together safely, I think that we can do things that we maybe didn't imagine.

2:27This is Sherry Davis. They help communities and local governments decide, together, how to spend public money. I talked to Sherry as they stood outside one of their favorite public places, the library. I am just out front of a really awesome neighborhood branch library. And around me are summer camp students or young people, children, basketball courts. It is a beautiful day in California. Sherry is at a branch of the Berkeley Public Library. But this library offers more than books. People can come here for all kinds of resources. And just outside, there is a tent set up with various seating areas and designated activities.

3:21So folks can rent a laptop. Folks can learn about kitchen equipment and rent an item that they want to do a kitchen equipment project with. So Sherry, it seems like some libraries have really figured out how to serve their neighbors to become the heart of a community. And maybe we should be looking to them as a kind of model if we want to build better public places, right? And build more of them. For sure. I think libraries are special in magical places. And in the work that I do, it's actually around seeing people create special magical spaces to be used in community. and libraries are an example of these beautiful hubs that can take on the shape of whatever community that uses them really needs.

4:12And so this example of a library is exactly that. We're seeing community members really define how they want to use the library, how they want to come together, how they want to learn, how they want to expand what a library could possibly be. And I think that that's a really powerful example of what happens when we do things like community led decision making that allow community members to radically imagine what's possible in a space and then live into it. Okay, this brings us to what you do. You help communities, as you said, build and support public places that actually meet their wants and needs through something called participatory budgeting.

4:55So for those who aren't familiar, what is participatory budgeting? In short, PD or participatory budgeting is a framework that centers community-led decision-making and allows community members to design, plan, and decide on how portions of a budget should be spent for use in a community. When we talk about deep participation or participatory democracy, we're talking about months-long processes that allow people to go through what it means to actually imagine a different world, to test it, to build it, and then to iterate on it, to evaluate that process. When I look around this library, I'm seeing folks that are engaging in activities or creating together.

5:48And they're also kind of designing the other pieces of this common space. That's what a public common is for. And I think what is possible in that space is everything. From the library to the playground, the town square to the local park, Citizens gather in public to play, learn, people watch, and feel part of a community. And at their best, these places build trust between neighbors. They create a cohesive society. But all too often, common spaces don't provide equally for everyone. Those who need these places the most are left out. And online? Creating inviting public places sometimes feels impossible.

6:37We've seen how the web can bring people together and turn them against each other. And so today on the show, what does it take to make sure a public place actually serves the public, online and off? Sherry Davis believes every one of us should have a say in how public places are built and run, And participatory budgeting is one way to make sure that happens. But it's still kind of a new concept in the U.S. Sherry first learned about participatory budgeting in 2014, back when they were working for the mayor of Boston. I remember it like it was yesterday. The mayor called me into his office and said, Sherry, we are going to run the country's first youth-focused participatory budgeting effort.

7:26And I said, yes, sir, marched right down to my desk and Googled what participatory budgeting was. And that's how I found out about a global movement that allowed community members to make real decisions about portions of a budget so that they could decide what resources they needed and what was going to offer them the best use of funding. of funding. Sherry Davis picks up the story in their TED Talk. It was 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts, and Mayor Menino asked me to launch the country's first youth-focused PB effort with $1 million of city funds. Now, we didn't start with line items and limits or spreadsheets and formulas.

8:14We started with people. So we brought in young people from historically and traditionally marginalized neighborhoods, members of the queer community, and youth that were formerly incarcerated. And together, we imagined a Boston where young people could feel safe in their communities and where they can transform public spaces into real hubs of life for all people. And that's exactly what they did. In the first year, young people allocated $90 ,000 to increase technology access for Boston Public High School students by delivering laptops right to Boston Public High Schools. They allocated$400 ,000 to renovating parks to make them more accessible for all people of all bodies.

9:03Now, admittedly, this didn't go as smoothly as we had planned. Right before we broke ground on the park, we actually found out that it was on top of an archaeological site and had to halt construction. I thought I broke PB. But because the city was so committed to the project, that's not what happened. They invited community in to do a dig, protected the site, found artifacts, and then moved forward with the renovation. If that isn't a reflection of radical imagination in government, I don't know what is. I had never even seen an archaeological dig before. And now I have young people coming out of their homes and participating in an archaeological dig that extended Boston's history.

9:54And so I didn't break PB, but again, I learned that there's actually some importance in deep community building and implementation. We could not have moved forward in protecting that site without community showing up. They showed up because they believed in what happened. I mean, Sherry, this all sounds amazing, but I can only assume that actually making it happen was incredibly hard. And I wonder if one of the hard things was just convincing people to give their time. Like, for me personally, I didn't even know that participatory budgeting was a thing in my neighborhood. And for other people, I wonder if they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, one more thing to do.

10:39I'll get to it eventually. Like, how do you convince people to take part? Well, I think we have to recognize that so often people want to be involved and they don't have an avenue to do that. So where do we channel that energy for effective and smart decision making? Well, PB is an opportunity for that. And I don't often have to convince people to do it, but I do have to explain that it will be real. And this is not about tokenized leadership. This is not like just for fun. This is powerful and it allows us to do things that maybe we didn't think about before. And that makes the argument itself.

11:24So can you just tell us, like, how widespread is participatory budgeting? Like, do we know, like, in terms of how many states or local municipalities? Like, how did it come about in the first place? Well, first of all, participatory budgeting has existed for over 30 years globally. And while it's maybe 10 years new in the United States, there are entire countries that do participatory budgeting. There are processes as large as what happens in Paris, France, where community members decide on over 100 million euros. Now, when you look at the United States, there are instances like Phoenix, Arizona, where they started with one school in their high school district where students had an opportunity to decide a portion of district dollars.

12:11Then it went to five schools, the entire district. And now Phoenix Union High School District is embarking on a journey of reimagining safety. They've made the decision and acknowledged that continuing to employ armed officers is not keeping students safe. And so they're saying, let's get clear on what safety means for us, driven by students, parents and teachers. And I'm like, this is the potential of what PB looks like. We started this conversation talking about how a public place can make a town or a community make people there feel like they belong, like they have a say. And I guess I'm wondering, like now that you've been doing this for a long time, what change do you see in people in terms of how they feel about their government if they have taken part in participatory budgeting?

13:07I think the biggest win that I see with participatory budgeting is actually the relationships. It's the trust built between community members and each other. It's the trust built between community members and those that are in government. For me, the biggest win is being able to change the way that you see yourself in this larger system and to understand that the system can be changed. And so, yes, I've seen beautification projects happen around cities across the country. I've seen new structures be built. But for me, it's the behavior change. For me, it's seeing folks say, like, hmm, being a community member is great, but I can be a part of something bigger.

13:51Actually, I want to run that agency. That's the real win for me. That's Sherry Davis, their co-executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project. And you can hear their full talk at TED.com. On the show today, the public commons. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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16:58I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, ideas about the public commons. We were just talking to Sherry Davis about how to make our public places more safe and welcoming. But how can we bring those values to places online? That is exactly what Eli Pariser is trying to figure out. All of these public spaces that we take for granted in the physical world, parks and libraries and, you know, all of this social infrastructure, doesn't exist in digital space mostly. We just don't have those kinds of institutions. Eli is probably best known for coining the term filter bubble about a decade ago. That's when he noticed that the internet was getting so personalized that we only saw what the algorithms assumed we wanted to see.

17:49And I mean, there are a couple of problems here. One is that, you know, sort of creates this feedback loop where you're fed content, you're likely to be interested on it. You click on it, that kind of confirms the model that the machine learning was building. And you're in this kind of pretty narrow echo chamber. And I think that's part of why we see as a country, our realities are drifting apart. And as someone who cares a lot about both, you know, America and democracy, it stresses me out. I think it's stressing a lot of people out that, you know, it's not just that we, like, disagree about particular policies.

18:29It's that the whole story of what is happening in the world is different depending on who you are when you log on to Facebook or Twitter. The big question, I think, is not just what do we want platforms to stop doing, but now that they've effectively taken control of our online public square, what do we need from them for the greater good? Here's Eli Pariser on the TED stage. To me, this is one of the most important questions of our time. What obligations do tech platforms have to us in exchange for the power that we let them hold over our discourse. So for the last year, I've been working with Dr.

19:14Talia Stroud at the University of Texas, Austin, and we've talked to sociologists and political scientists and philosophers to try to answer this question. We asked, what happens when we think about platforms as spaces? And for us, the platform crisis is a people problem. It's a problem about the emergent weird things that happen when large groups of people get together. We know from social psychology that spaces shape behavior. When researchers put softer furniture in classrooms, participation rates rose by 42 percent. And spaces even have political consequences. When researchers looked at neighborhoods with parks versus neighborhoods without, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, they found that neighborhoods with parks had higher levels of social trust and were better able to advocate for themselves politically.

20:06So spaces shape behavior partly by the way they're designed and partly by the way that they encode certain norms about how to behave. You know, we all know that there are some behaviors that are okay in a bar that are not okay in a library and maybe vice versa. And this gives us a little bit of a clue because there are online spaces that encode these same kinds of behavioral norms. So, for example, behavior on LinkedIn seems pretty good. Why? Because it reads as a workplace. And so people follow workplace norms. If LinkedIn is a workplace, what is Twitter like? Well, it's like a vast cavernous expanse where there are people talking about sports, arguing about politics, yelling at each other, flirting, trying to get a job, all in the same place with no walls, no divisions, and the owner gets paid more the louder the noise is.

21:06No wonder it's a mess. And this raises another thing that becomes obvious when we think about platforms in terms of physical space. Good physical spaces are almost always structured. They have rules. So Eli, you did some research into how these rules in the real world sort of guide people. Like say to them, you know, this is how you should behave in these spaces. And you tried to figure out, you know, whether that was possible to translate those guidelines into how we behave online, right? Yeah. So then our project became like, well, what are the qualities of public spaces that kind of translate into digital platforms?

21:50And we ended up with four categories, which was welcome, connect, understand and act. Welcome, connect, understand, and act, okay? Yeah, and we actually, like, polled people in 20 countries, and we saw that there was this big buy-in to this notion that, like, yeah, we want these qualities in our spaces, and also the platforms that we have now aren't really doing a great job of delivering them. Okay, so four steps to a better internet. I've got to say I'm a little skeptical, but let's do it. Where do we start? Yeah, well, I think welcome is kind of the foundation layer, which is, do I actually feel like I belong here?

22:31Do I feel like I'm invited here? Do I feel safe here? And, you know, I think in some ways, when people do use spatial metaphors, we over focus on like, a town square and people arguing about politics. but actually like a lot of what we've used public space for in democracies over the centuries isn't to like walk up to strangers and tell them your most incendiary political opinion, but it's like to have an experience of like, oh, I can go outside and I'm safe and other people are kind of like with their families and I can see how they relate to them and it's okay. And And that's actually a really important experience for people to have.

23:17And it's a place both that people told us that they didn't feel like current digital environments did a great job of, especially if they're coming from more typically marginalized communities. But it's also just not a place that most of these companies have put in a whole lot of thought or effort. Okay, so welcome. So we've got welcome. Yeah. And then connect is kind of the it's a word that's been used a lot in digital space. That was famously, you know, Facebook's mission. But really underneath connect, what we're talking about is how do you bring groups together in ways that they actually form cross group bonds and ties?

23:54What we know from the social science is that if you bring two groups of people into a space and you have them play tug of war in those initial two groups, they reinforce their bonds with each other. and they reinforce the antagonism to the other group. If you mix up the groups, and this is an experiment that's been done, you start to erode that sense of kind of like, there's us and there's them. And a lot of that is about the rules of the space. And so I think our point with Connect is that this is something that really has to be designed for. It's not something that just happens when you throw people into a space naturally that they form these kind of cross-cutting connections.

24:32I mean, this kind of is reminding me of icebreaker exercises at conferences that I've been to where they want to make sure you don't just sit with the people you already know or people you came with. OK, so we've been welcomed. Connections have been facilitated. And then what? So then, yeah, understanding what we think about in this understanding category is how do we like make meaning together? So Audrey Tang, who's this amazing digital pioneer in Taiwan, has a system called Polis. And POLIS is kind of like some of the like online petition systems that folks may have seen here, except that essentially what gets elevated to the Taiwanese government is what there is kind of the most cross-sectional support for in the society.

25:17So if lots of people across different groups all agree with the same statement and sign on to it, then that's a really important signal that like, hey, this is a really urgent issue to address. That turns out to be a really different set of issues from what each little tiny activist subgroup might want to elevate on a petition platform. And so I just offer that as an example of, you know, there are ways you can design online systems that support like, oh, we have some shared goals. Some of them are kind of boring, but really important to a lot of people like filling potholes. And that's important for governments to know to be responsive.

25:59And then there's this last piece of acting together. Sociologists call it kind of collective efficacy, but this idea that, hey, if there's a problem that comes up, we can see it, we can address it together and we can do something about it. It turns out that not only is that a really strong predictor of kind of positive community outcomes, but it also turns out, interestingly, that that's a function of how many public spaces you have in your community. And so places that have more public spaces have a higher level of collective efficacy. For example, I grew up in a small town in Maine, and I went to a lot of those town hall meetings that you hear about.

26:43And unlike sort of the storybook version, they weren't always nice. Like, people had big conflicts, big feelings. It was hard sometimes. But because of the way that that space was structured, we managed to land it okay. How? Well, here's one important piece. The downcast glance, the dirty look, the raised eyebrow, the cough. When people went on too long or lost the crowd, they didn't get banned or blocked or hauled out by the police. They just got this soft, negative social feedback. And that was actually very powerful. I think, you know, Facebook and Twitter could build this. Digital designers could think about what kind of conversations do we actually want to invite?

27:32And how do we build specifically for those kinds of conversations? But the difference is with a physical public space is that at least those people come with at least one thing in common, which is that, you know, geography, their bodies are in the same place. How that that is not the case with being on the World Wide Web. Like who who decides online? Are we talking about creating kind of a governance? Like what does this look like if we put those four pillars to work in a digital public space? Well, I think in order to put these to really kind of embrace these signals, I mean, I think the existing platforms can make some moves toward being better on these signals.

28:18signals. But I think ultimately, we have to reckon with the fact that we need a really different approach to online space, that the idea that we're going to come up with some magical algorithm that's going to serve all of these different needs for all of these, you know, hundreds of different countries and millions of different communities and billions of people on its face seems absurd and is absurd and that we need to start thinking again in terms of the kinds of community institutions that have worked in the past and that's the libraries and the parks that do have a somewhat there there there's not one solution for everyone they're situated in particular spaces in particular communities and they're governed by those communities and so they are suited to the particular needs of those communities in ways that one top-down algorithm is not going to be able to be.

29:16And some of those might be still profit-driven, and some of them might put the public interest first the way that parks and libraries do. And I think that's actually a much more durable model, is to have lots of well-constructed communities than one giant free-for-all that's global in scale, but that makes it really hard to manage. Okay, so let's just sum it up. You're envisioning this mix of public and private online places that meet the needs of different groups in new kinds of ways. But to build these places, you are saying that we need a new design movement. We need urban designers for the digital world.

30:02And I'm guessing like people are thinking, I love this idea, but the internet is way too far gone. We are at the point of no return. Definitely, Eli, there are going to be people who are thinking that. And I guess, how do you respond to the most cynical people out there who are listening and maybe don't even believe it is possible to build something egalitarian on the internet? I would say, number one, this is something we've done many times in the past with similar, you know, sort of capital formations arrayed against these causes. You know, one big hero of mine is Jane Jacobs, who kind of changed how we thought about cities and neighborhoods and what good neighborhoods looked like and having like a walkable, livable neighborhood where you see and meet people.

30:53So that's one piece. I think the second piece is this doesn't have to be about competing with a giant like a Facebook or Google on its own turf. There's a really compelling argument to be made that if we invest in our digital ecosystem, that's going to be good for everyone who's part of it, including these companies, because they're not going to be the sole line of defense against the negative externalities that they're also in some ways creating. You know, so I think there's a, as we all kind of grow up a bit with the internet, I think there's a more mature way of looking at it that says like, of course we need all of these different pieces of infrastructure working together if we want to have a healthy society.