Common use of General Findings Clause in Contracts

General Findings. What findings can be drawn from these seven case studies? First, there seems to be no clear relationship between one aspect of ‘publicness’ and another. In other words, it cannot be said that a privately-owned public space is by definition less accessible, or a privately-managed space automatically more exclusive. In the Netherlands, Proefpark De Punt is a clear example of a space under fully private management that is, if anything, even more inclusive than many government- owned parks: What’s special about this is precisely that there is no gate, so yes, in the evening you get youths hanging around, and at night you get the Bulgarians drinking their whisky until the morning. Well, they are just as welcome as the good citizens. (Interview Proefpark De Punt) Second, there is a significant difference in governance culture between the British and the Dutch cases with regard to the relationship between public and private parties. As mentioned, many British site managers argue that local governments were happy to see new private developments as it represented an improvement of the particular site. In the Dutch cases, local government is often far more wary of handing over responsibilities to the private sector. This can be seen most clearly in the case of the ArenA Boulevard, where the only involvement of the private sector is a very loose and informal form of public-private cooperation. As a local government official put it: Downloaded by [Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen] at 04:33 19 November 2013 If you give them too much influence, that means that you cannot really weigh the common good anymore. Well, that is what you just shouldn’t do as a municipality At the end of the day it’s a case of he who pays the piper calls the tune in this country. You have to be reasonable and fair as a municipality, and that would be very hard to maintain It’s an illusion to say in this country private parties pay for it because they like you. That’s not going to happen. There is something in return. (Interview ArenA Boulevard) Consequently, responsibility for public space in the Dutch cases is still very much the responsibility of local government, and exceptions to that rule seem to be a much rarer than in the British context. This might explain why public spaces that are completely privately owned or managed are more difficult to find in the Netherlands than they are in Britain. Discussion: Reflecting on the OMAI Model By applying the model to seven case studies, the study has highlighted the fact that there is significant variation in patterns of ownership, management, accessibility and inclusiveness, both between Britain and the Netherlands and within these two countries. As indicated above, there is no clear-cut relationship between these four factors. The study has already alluded to some of the advantages of the OMAI model compared to previous models, but one particularly distinctive feature of the model warrants repetition. The OMAI model, more so than other models, explicitly contrasts the main indicators of the involvement of the private sector in public space (ownership and management), with the consequences of this involvement (accessibility and inclusiveness). Hence, it should primarily be regarded as a tool for the analysis of private-sector involvement in public space rather than as overarching operationalization of public space. The OMAI model is particularly suitable for this specific task. A couple of caveats are nevertheless in order at this point. First, it must be stressed that the model is not meant as a tool for making moral judgements. The argument has not been that less accessible or less inclusive spaces are by definition ‘bad’ spaces, nor that ‘publicness’ is the only standard by which the quality of public space should be judged. For example, urban public spaces that are fully public might still be criticized for being overly commercialized, which is a separate line of argument. Similarly, it should be emphasized that while ‘fully public’ space might exist in the model, such spaces will be hard to find in reality. As indicated earlier, no space is ever equally accessible to all members of the public and no space will ever meet the demands of all users, as some of these are bound to be conflictive. It might be said that in reality, there is no such thing as ‘the public’ – a space that feels open and inclusive to some might convey the opposite feelings to others. Even for a single user, it might be difficult to rank emotions such as feelings of inclusiveness. It is suggested that there is significant scope for future research to more fully investigate the feelings, perceptions and subjectivities behind the publicness of public space for different user groups. Downloaded by [Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen] at 04:33 19 November 2013 Finally, it should be acknowledged that while it is thought that ownership, management, accessibility and inclusiveness are essential aspects of ‘publicness’, its definition and operationalization could be more fine-grained. For example, future comparative research might theorize on how ‘publicness’ is defined amongst different cultural contexts. ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ and ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ (2007) have already discussed different definitions of ‘the public’ (in literature, by academics and by practitioners), but only within one national context (the United States). In the four dimensions, the involvement of the local government is an important determinant of the degree of publicness. However, government-involvement should not be taken for granted and may differ per context. For the Dutch cases, it proved to be essential in defining ‘public’ space, but that parameter is different in Britain and probably elsewhere. The question of what makes public space ‘public’, posed earlier in this paper, might be formulated again from this cultural perspective. Despite these limitations, the OMAI model is a useful tool for bringing the differences between the ‘publicness’ of spaces into view in a relatively objective way, in order to compare different cases in terms of ownership, management, accessibility and inclusiveness. The public-space debate profits from this more nuanced view on privatization which, it is argued, is not as black-and-white as some of the ‘literature of loss’ seems to suggest.