Specifying Planters for Public Realm and Civic Spaces
Creating Landscapes That Support Placemaking, Regeneration and Community Use
Most commercial planters are specified to improve a building or its setting. Public realm planters are usually specified for a different purpose. A town square, a regenerated high street, a transport hub or a civic plaza is not generating rent or direct income — the landscape is there to support wider objectives such as footfall, regeneration, civic identity and public amenity.
This has practical consequences for specification, which is affected by who is funding the scheme, who is responsible for its upkeep, how secure the maintenance budget is over the life of the asset, and the level of unsupervised public use the landscape needs to withstand. This guide sets out what public realm and civic landscape is generally intended to achieve, and what that purpose means in practice for specifying planters, trees and integrated features such as seating.
What Is Public Realm?
Public realm covers the outdoor spaces that the public can use freely, day to day, whether or not they’re technically owned by a council or other public authority. In practice that means places like town squares, civic plazas, streetscapes, transport hubs, waterfronts, university campuses, cultural destinations, parks and the public-facing spaces around mixed-use developments.
The common factor is not ownership but use. These spaces are unsupervised and open to anyone, and they are typically used by people with very different purposes at the same time – pedestrians passing through, visitors stopping to sit, and contractors needing access for servicing and maintenance. The landscape has to accommodate all of these uses simultaneously, without intrusive control over who is using the space at a given time.
Why Do Clients Invest in Public Realm?
Almost never for income from the landscape itself. The case for investment is usually built on what wider benefits landscape can deliver:
- Placemaking and civic identity – giving a town centre or a new development a sense of somewhere, rather than just a route through it.
- Regeneration – public realm spending is often the visible, first phase of a wider regeneration scheme, intended to change how an area is perceived before the rest of the investment follows.
- Footfall and local trade – an attractive, comfortable street brings people who then spend money in the shops, cafes and businesses along it.
- Dwell time – encouraging people to remain in a space rather than simply pass through it, which is generally regarded as a key measure of a public realm scheme’s success.
- Wellbeing and public amenity – access to greenery and somewhere to sit outdoors, particularly in dense urban areas where private gardens aren’t an option.
None of these benefits represent a direct return on the landscape budget. They are measured through indicators such as business rates, footfall, property values, planning approval and public satisfaction, which are linked to the landscape only indirectly. As a result, the business case for public realm investment is often harder to establish, and harder to defend over time, than for landscape in a commercial development, where the link to income is either more direct, or the landscaping is required to satisfy a specific commercial or planning condition.
