Strong Towns: London should design public space around use, not objects

Most people can design a usable kitchen without professional help. They start with what happens in the room: cooking, conversation, washing up, the quiet corner where someone pays bills. They do not start with the number of worktops. Strong Towns, the US-based urban research and advocacy organisation, argues in a new article that this instinct usually disappears when people sit down to design a street, park or square.

The article, “What We Get Right at Home and Wrong in Public”, published on 14 August 2026, says public projects too often begin with physical components: benches, trees, lighting, materials and equipment. The question asked is what a place should contain, not what behaviours and activities it needs to support. Strong Towns argues the result can be “a collection of objects mistaken for a functioning environment”.

That comparison is not just rhetorical. Counter space at home is not valuable because countertops are good in themselves, the article says; it is valuable because it makes preparing food easier. The position of a stove affects how people move. Storage reflects how often things are used. When we design our own homes, Strong Towns writes, we treat space as an ongoing relationship between people, activities, objects and movement. That logic often breaks down when the conversation shifts to the public realm.

The article also acknowledges the genuine difficulty of shared space. A household of three can usually agree where the coffee mugs go. A neighbourhood park has to serve thousands of people, many of whom want different things from the same place. Seeing what success looks like can take time. But Strong Towns says many obstacles in public placemaking are not natural challenges of working with other people. They are institutional habits layered on top: the rules that govern what can be built, the processes through which decisions are made, and the ways projects are funded.

Why a kitchen is a useful lens

The home comparison is effective because it exposes how unusual object-led thinking is in private life. A showroom-style minimalist entryway cannot withstand a family coming and going all day. Grocery shopping without a recipe leaves you with a refrigerator full of ingredients that do not work together.

In the public realm, the same failure happens when a scheme is specified before anyone asks what it is for. A park can meet every design standard and still feel empty if it does not support the activities people want: sitting in sun, watching children play, meeting neighbours, passing through quickly. Strong Towns suggests that when public projects start from a list of required objects, they risk producing environments that satisfy the regulation more effectively than they serve the place.

The first trap: rules written for easy maintenance

Most public spaces are managed by public agencies that must control budgets, manage liability and keep investments safe and durable. Those concerns are not wrong. But Strong Towns says they can push human use out of the design.

One example in the article is a park designed around the needs of an industrial lawn mower, which makes it hard to create the small nooks and pathways people actually enjoy. Another is blanket design regulation: setbacks, landscaping requirements, facade treatments and minimum green space. A required patch of grass along a busy pedestrian route may fulfil a planning rule on paper, but in practice can become a muddy, worn strip that needs constant maintenance and gives little back.

The same logic appears in the preference for fixed objects over flexible ones. A bolted-down bench is predictable to manage. A movable chair can be stolen or moved in unexpected ways, but it also lets people follow the sun, join a conversation or make a space feel their own. Permitting rules for temporary tents, amplified sound, food vendors and outdoor gatherings can be set at thresholds designed for much larger events, so the step between doing nothing and doing something becomes surprisingly high.

The trade-off is familiar to anyone who works on London streets and parks: risk is easier to manage than responsiveness. Strong Towns is not arguing that maintenance is irrelevant. It is arguing that a place designed mainly to reduce risk can become less usable by the people it is meant to serve.

The second trap: designing before anyone has used the place

Strong Towns identifies a second institutional habit in the way decisions are reached. In many communities, every significant decision is made before anyone can observe how people respond to a proposed change. Designers, planners, engineers and officials are expected to determine what a place will need years in advance, then build it all at once. The article describes this as being “asked to predict an ecosystem instead of cultivate one”.

At home, people learn by living in a space. A chair gets relocated because it

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