Parks should be made for people. Why does such an obvious idea elude us?

William H. Whyte’s wisdom sounds almost laughably obvious: “People will sit where there are places to sit.” When the journalist’s 1980 film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces played last week to a full house hosted by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, the audience did, in fact, chuckle.

But the line resonates, because our urban parks largely fail to provide such basic amenities. The screening and the discussion that followed raised a thorny question: Why do we persist in getting public urban space wrong when the formula has long been obvious?