The New Town Square

Walk through the centre of almost any European city and you will find a square. A piazza, a platz, a place, a plaza — the word changes but the function is universal. It is a space where people gather without needing a reason. Where the retired sit on benches in the morning sun. Where teenagers congregate in the evening. Where markets set up on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Where protests happen and festivals are staged and strangers become acquaintances become friends through nothing more than repeated, unstructured proximity.

Now walk through the centre of almost any British town, and look for the equivalent. In many cases, you will not find it. What you will find is a pedestrianised shopping street — a space defined entirely by commerce, designed to move people between shops, and which becomes deserted the moment the shops close. Or you will find a car park. Or a roundabout. Or a patch of grass behind the leisure centre that nobody maintains and nobody uses.

Britain has, over the past fifty years, systematically divested itself of public gathering space. And it is about to pay an enormous price for that divestment.

The Sell-Off

The scale of public land disposal in the UK is staggering. Between 2014 and 2021, English councils sold approximately £15 billion worth of public land and property, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Playing fields, parks, community centres, libraries, swimming pools, youth clubs — all sold, often to private developers, often at below market value, in a desperate attempt to balance budgets cut by central government austerity.

The Heritage Lottery Fund estimated that UK parks have seen real-terms funding cuts of approximately 45 per cent since 2010. The Association for Public Service Excellence reported that over 40 per cent of councils have either closed parks facilities or reduced maintenance to minimum levels. Keep Britain Tidy found that satisfaction with local parks fell significantly between 2014 and 2020, with overgrown grass, broken equipment, and antisocial behaviour cited as primary concerns.

The logic of these cuts was straightforward: parks are nice but not essential. When budgets are tight, you protect statutory services — social care, waste collection, housing — and you cut discretionary spending. Parks and public spaces were treated as discretionary.

This logic was wrong then. In the context of AI displacement, it is catastrophic now.

The Evidence for Public Space

The research base linking access to public green space with mental health outcomes is now extensive and unambiguous. A landmark study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, analysing data from over 900 million people across multiple countries, found that higher levels of green space exposure were associated with significant reductions in salivary cortisol (a physiological measure of stress), heart rate, diastolic blood pressure, incidence of type II diabetes, cardiovascular mortality, and all-cause mortality. The relationship was dose-dependent: more green space exposure meant better outcomes.

Specifically on loneliness, research published in the journal Environment and Behavior found that residents with access to well-maintained neighbourhood green spaces reported approximately 30 per cent lower loneliness scores than those without. A study by the University of Sheffield found that parks and public gardens were the most commonly cited sites for incidental social interaction among older adults — more than shops, more than churches, more than any other category of public or private space.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Public spaces function as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called third places — environments that are neither home (first place) nor work (second place) but something in between. Third places are characterised by informality, accessibility, regular patronage, and a levelling effect that cuts across class and age boundaries. They are the glue of community life.

When work disappears as a second place for millions of people, the third place becomes not merely important but existentially necessary. Without it, there is only the first place — the home — and the screen.

Learning from Cities That Invest

Copenhagen, Denmark: Superkilen. Opened in 2012 in the ethnically diverse Nørrebro neighbourhood, Superkilen is a public park designed explicitly as social infrastructure. Stretching over 30,000 square metres, it is divided into three zones — the Red Square (a hardscaped area for markets and events), the Black Market (a central meeting point with a Moroccan fountain and Japanese cherry trees), and the Green Park (a landscaped area for sport and picnics). The design incorporates objects sourced from over 50 countries, reflecting the nationalities of local residents. Usage studies show that Superkilen attracts over a million visits per year and has measurably increased social mixing between the neighbourhood's diverse communities.

Melbourne, Australia: Federation Square. Built on a former rail yard and opened in 2002, Federation Square was initially controversial — critics called it ugly, expensive, and unnecessary. Twenty years later, it is the most visited destination in Melbourne, attracting over 10 million visits per year. It hosts more than 2,000 events annually. It has become the de facto civic heart of the city — the place where people gather to celebrate, to mourn, to protest, and simply to be. Its success lies in its design as a genuinely public space with no entry charge, no membership requirement, and no expectation of purchase.

Medellín, Colombia: Library Parks. In the early 2000s, the city of Medellín — then one of the most violent in the world — invested heavily in public infrastructure in its poorest neighbourhoods. The centrepieces were the Parques Biblioteca: combined library, community centre, and public park facilities built on prominent hilltop sites in informal settlements. The España Library Park, designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti, became a global icon of social urbanism. The programme was credited with significant reductions in homicide rates and dramatic improvements in social cohesion in the neighbourhoods served. The lesson: investing in public gathering infrastructure in the most deprived areas delivers the greatest returns.

The Weather Problem — And How to Solve It

There is an objection that arises whenever Northern European planners discuss public gathering space, and it is this: the weather. Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain all share climates in which outdoor public life is challenged for significant portions of the year by cold, rain, wind, and darkness.

This objection is real but not insurmountable. The cities that handle it best do so through a combination of strategies that British councils should study and adopt.

Covered public spaces. The concept is ancient — the Roman forum was partially covered, medieval market halls provided shelter, the Victorian arcade combined commerce with weather protection. Modern interpretations include Rotterdam's Markthal, a covered market with 100 food stalls and a 36,000-square-foot residential arch overhead; the winter gardens in Sheffield, a 21-metre-high glasshouse in the city centre that provides year-round access to green space and warmth; and the covered squares of Nordic cities, where retractable awnings and glass canopies extend the usable season for outdoor gathering.

Heated outdoor spaces. This sounds extravagant until you consider the cost-benefit calculation. Infrared heaters on a public terrace cost pence per hour to operate. A heated bandstand or covered seating area can extend outdoor social life from six months of the year to twelve. Scandinavian cities routinely provide heated benches and sheltered gathering points in public parks. The cost is trivial compared to the social value generated.

Winter gardens and conservatories. Public glasshouses — warm, planted, free to enter — function as year-round third places. The Palm House at Sefton Park in Liverpool, the Temperate House at Kew, the winter gardens in Sunderland — these are not merely botanical attractions. They are warm, welcoming, publicly accessible spaces where people linger, talk, and connect regardless of the weather outside. Every significant town should have one.

All-weather outdoor fitness. The Helsinki model of outdoor fitness equipment in public parks has been adopted across Finland, Estonia, and increasingly in South Korea, where Seoul has installed over 4,000 outdoor gym stations across the city. These are not the rusting metal frames of 1990s British fitness trails. They are modern, well-designed, weather-resistant installations that enable free exercise in public space year-round. They attract users of all ages and create the conditions for the kind of informal social contact — the nod, the shared joke, the offered tip — that builds community over time.

Free Fitness, Public Belonging

The connection between public gathering spaces and the fitness and leisure industry is not incidental — it is fundamental. The most vibrant public spaces in the world are not empty plazas. They are spaces where people are doing things: moving, playing, exercising, competing, dancing, stretching, climbing.

When you install outdoor gym equipment in a park, you do not merely provide free exercise. You create a social node — a point of attraction that draws people into public space and holds them there long enough for social interaction to occur. When you mark a running loop through a town centre, you create a moving community of regulars who come to recognise each other and, eventually, to know each other. When you programme a public square with morning yoga, lunchtime dancing, and evening tai chi, you create structured social contact opportunities that function as community infrastructure.

The fitness industry understands something that government has been slow to grasp: people will leave their houses for their bodies. Even when they will not leave for errands, for shopping, for socialising in the abstract, they will leave to move. Exercise is one of the last activities that stubbornly resists digitalisation. You cannot outsource a press-up. You cannot automate a swim. You cannot have a run delivered.

This makes fitness the single most reliable mechanism for getting isolated people out of their homes and into contact with other human beings. And when that fitness is free, in public space, with no membership barrier and no postcode requirement, it becomes a universal belonging infrastructure — available to everyone, regardless of income, age, or social confidence.

Build the Square. Fund the Park. Save the Community.

The decisions you face as a council, a mayor, a planner, are not abstract. They are concrete, immediate, and consequential.

Stop selling public land. Every hectare you dispose of is a hectare your community cannot gather on. The short-term budget relief is not worth the long-term social cost — a cost that will arrive, with interest, when AI displacement hits and your residents have nowhere to go and no one to see.

Restore park maintenance budgets. A neglected park is worse than no park at all — it signals abandonment and attracts antisocial behaviour, driving away the very people who most need its social benefits. A well-maintained park, by contrast, is the cheapest community intervention available to any council.

Build covered public spaces. Not shopping centres — public spaces. Warm, free, accessible, designed for gathering rather than spending. Winter gardens, covered markets, glass-roofed squares, heated terraces. Solve the weather problem and you solve the participation problem.

Install free outdoor fitness equipment. Not as a gimmick, not as a photo opportunity, but as permanent, well-maintained social infrastructure in every significant public green space and town centre. Follow Helsinki. Follow Seoul. Make movement free and public and social.

Commission new town squares. Not retail plazas, not branded commercial spaces, but genuine civic gathering places — with seating, shelter, programming, and no expectation of purchase. Every town should have a space where any resident can go, at any time, and find other people simply being there.

The fitness and wellness industry is the natural partner in all of this. It has the expertise, the programming knowledge, the motivational frameworks, and the deep understanding of what makes people leave their homes and move their bodies in shared space. Work with it. Fund it. Integrate it into every public space strategy you develop.

The communities that thrive through AI displacement will be the communities that have places to gather — warm, welcoming, active, free, and full of people moving together. The communities that collapse will be the ones that sold their parks, closed their pools, paved over their squares, and left their residents with nowhere to go but home.

You know which kind of community you want to lead. Now build it.

Continue exploring the Belonging Economy — the emerging framework for communities, industries, and governments navigating the age of AI displacement.