Insight

Public Space Is Not a Food Court

Commerce can sit in a public landscape. It cannot be the only plan. Thinking through what makes outdoor space cultural rather than a food court with trees.

Alaa Almallah September 21, 2025 11 min read

On civic and institutional landscapes I keep returning to one question:

If every vendor left tomorrow, what would still be possible here?

If the honest answer is "almost nothing," the plan was never a public. It was a retail layout with trees.

Food trucks can make profit. They will not make culture. That is not anti-hospitality. It is a boundary. Profit can sit in the picture. When commerce becomes the only activation logic, design optimizes for extraction: short visits, spend paths, brand takeovers, and culture reduced to a poster on a fence.

This is the stance post for a set of essays on outdoor space-making. The work that made the question sharp was design on the outdoor landscape of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Library: how a knowledge institution extends beyond its walls without turning the grounds into a fairground. Project thinking: Extending the Library Beyond Its Walls.

How the commercial-only plan thinks

Watch the sequence most briefs quietly reward:

Maximize footfall
Convert footfall into spend
Call the conversion "activation"
Add art if marketing needs images

Under that sequence, seats exist to hold people near kiosks. Shade exists to keep queues cool. Night lighting exists to extend retail hours. Free learning becomes a special event, not a spatial right.

If the plan optimizes for...	The space teaches...
Spend path	You belong when you buy
Event as brand takeover	Culture is sponsored content
Night as retail hours	After dark is for consumption
Art as photo prop	Meaning is optional

Cities need revenue. Maintenance costs money. F+B can fund care and extend dwell. The failure mode is hierarchy. When F+B owns the zoning diagram, performance, quiet learning, and free play become leftovers, if they appear at all.

What I mean by culture outdoors

Culture here is not a vibe word. It is a set of permission structures: spatial conditions that make certain human acts normal.

Listening together without buying a ticket every time
Teaching and learning in the open
Children playing without a purchase
Strangers sharing a table, a game, or a pause
Art that can be retold, not only photographed

Those acts need rooms, edges, time, and climate comfort. They do not appear because a masterplan says "flexible multi-use plaza." Multi-use without hierarchy usually means whoever shouts loudest (or pays most) wins.

This is the outdoor form of a standard I use across practice: forms people can use and feel (complex ideas, clear forms). Use without feeling is infrastructure people endure. Feeling without use is a render.

A working test (not a slogan)

When I review an outdoor plan, mine or someone else's, I walk it with five questions:

Can someone learn here without spending?
Can a free lecture or film work after dark in this climate, or only in brochure season?
Is there a place designed for attention (performance, story) that is not also a food queue?
Does art carry a story a child could retell, or only a brand mark?
Who is still welcome when they have little money?

Fail three of five and you are close to a food court with trees. Pass them and commerce can return as support: coffee at the edge of a gathering, not the reason the gathering exists.

Why this is hard in practice

Clients rarely ask for a food court. They ask for "vibrancy," "activation," "destination," "24/7 life." Those words stay empty until you decide what activity is allowed to lose money.

Culture often loses money on paper and still creates public value: trust, belonging, education, night-time safety through presence, institutional reputation. If the financial model cannot hold any non-revenue activity, the design team gets pushed, quietly, to delete amphitheater focus, quiet botanical time, and free play in favor of more kiosk frontage.

That pressure is where design ethics show up. Not in the manifesto. In the revision that removes the last free shade cluster because a vendor wants the frontage.

How this stance shaped the library landscape thinking

On the library grounds, the institutional mission is knowledge, heritage, and community, not merchandising. The order I held was:

What outdoor rooms does a library need so the mission continues outside?
What program can those rooms hold across a week, not only a festival?
What climate and night conditions make that program real in Dubai?
What art carries narrative into the body of the place?
Only then: where can F+B and games sit as informal anchors without owning the plan?

The rest of this terrace details that order: activated rooms, activation after dark, narrative artwork.

Outdoor commerce has a place on a library site. It cannot be the first line of the story.

Where commerce sits without becoming the masterplan

Commerce can:

Help fund maintenance and staff presence
Extend dwell with food and drink
Host informal social anchors

Commerce should not:

Define the zoning hierarchy alone
Replace free cultural program
Redefine "activation" as retail pop-ups only

When F+B and social gaming appear in a cultural masterplan, treat them as support loops: useful, human, secondary. The mission stays: sharing and learning in public.