ABSTRACT
What should the state provide public goods such as public space? The scholarly literature includes three different answers to this question: market failures, basic needs, and democracy. This chapter briefly analyzes these theories and explains why they do not provide an adequate rationale for the public provision of parks. Next, I examine the history of the public trust doctrine, which has been advanced as a legal tool for protecting the natural environment and parkland. Proponents see the doctrine as a way to protect public access to land, but critics point to the anti-democratic character of a mechanism that binds future generations and limits the ability of citizens to balance competing priorities. I introduce the solidarist approach to public space and show how this helps realize the normative aspirations of the public trust doctrine while limiting its potentially anti-democratic implications. Solidarism is a theory of compensatory justice and, while it might at first seem like an odd way to think about it, public parks are a way of compensating for the loss of nature, and public space is way of compensating for the high cost of land.
