Valuing public space
In summer evenings at Liberty Pool, located on Spokane’s east side, children and parents from throughout the city and county congregate for the last swim of the day. In the parking lot, you spot every type of car, from brand-new SUVs to older-model cars with duct tape holding together damaged bumpers.
The pool attracts a diverse crowd, ethnically and socioeconomically, because it’s right off the freeway, and it boasts both high dive and wading pools. Liberty Pool feels like a vibrant public space. The pool is a great leveler. People chat across the cultural differences that might ordinarily divide them.
Within the year, Spokane voters will be asked to decide the best use of some of the city’s oldest public spaces. A bond will likely be floated to finance the rebuilding of Spokane’s five aging pools. Comstock, Hillyard, Cannon, Witter and Liberty pools were built between 1937 and 1984. Voters might also be asked to help pay for the building of an indoor aquatic facility.
Albi Stadium, which was named Memorial Stadium when it opened on Spokane’s North Side in 1950, once hosted Pac-10 football, rodeos and even Elvis Presley. Now it’s a high school football stadium surrounded by acres of open land. Its fate is also on the future board. Voters may be asked to spend millions of dollars to expand the area around the football field to include ballfields, a skate park and a BMX bike track.
Discussions about what to do with the pools, and ways to better utilize Albi, will likely fall into familiar patterns of disagreement. Older folks who never attend football games might wonder why Albi has to be redesigned in such a way to attract even more teens to the area. (Popular soccer fields are already adjacent to the stadium.)
People who never swam here as children and never use the pools with their children might wonder why their tax money needs to be spent on such expensive pools, open only during the summer.
Discussions pitting those who use these public spaces against those who don’t are rarely productive. There is another way to have civic – and civil – conversations about the future of public spaces within a community.
They begin with the question: What is the value of public space? In this Internet, 500-cable TV channel world, sociologists believe public spaces are needed more than ever to force families out of isolation.
The nonprofit group Project for Public Spaces ( www.pps.org) has evaluated public spaces around the world. The group has identified the qualities shared by the best ones: They are accessible; people use them; the space is comfortable, welcoming and safe; people meet each other there and show off the space to out-of-town visitors.
Summer’s almost here. The pools open June 18. The area surrounding Albi Stadium makes for a good summer morning hike. Spokane residents should check out these old public spaces in need of updates. They’ll want to be properly informed for the substantial pocketbook decisions that lie ahead.