Public goods
What must we provide together, and how do we make it genuinely public?
A public good has economic properties, but becoming genuinely public is an institutional, spatial and political achievement.
Start with a railway ↓The public-goods chain ↓Choose your pathway ↓Theoretical framework
Analysis
Strategy
Governance and finance
Evaluation
Has the railway produced a public good?
A regional railway opens. Journey times fall, new opportunities become accessible and land values rise around the stations. Yet fares remain unaffordable for some residents, people living beyond the feeder network receive little benefit, and lower-income tenants are displaced as neighbourhoods become more desirable. Public investment has created value, but much of that value has been captured privately.
Figure 1. A regional railway opens. An illustrative case.
The answer depends on what we mean by ‘public’, what we mean by ‘good’, and which part of the railway system we are examining. The tracks and stations are infrastructure. The trains provide a service. The wider public purpose might be mobility, accessibility, reduced emissions or regional integration. Whether those outcomes materialise depends on location, fares, frequency, governance, maintenance and the distribution of benefits and burdens.
This is why public goods matter to spatial planning. They connect economics to ethics, infrastructure to capabilities, and collective investment to the question of who can actually live well in a city or region (Rocco, 2026).
Four questions hidden inside one expression
The expression ‘public good’ is used in several ways. These meanings overlap, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.
What kind of good is it?
Can people be excluded from using it? Does one person’s use reduce what remains available to others?
Who provides and governs it?
A government, cooperative, community organisation, regulated company or partnership may provide a good. Ownership, finance, regulation and delivery can be organised in different ways.
Why should it be secured collectively?
A society may decide that healthcare, education, housing or mobility should be available because they support dignity, freedom, democracy or equality, even when they do not meet the strict economic definition of a public good.
Who can actually benefit from it?
A facility may exist and still be too distant, expensive, unsafe, inaccessible or culturally hostile for some people to use.
These questions should be connected, but not collapsed into one another.
Non-excludable and non-rivalrous
In economics, a pure public good has two properties: it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous (Samuelson, 1954).
Non-excludable
Preventing people from benefiting is difficult or prohibitively expensive. Street lighting illuminates the street for everyone nearby, including people who did not pay directly for it.
Non-rivalrous
One person’s benefit does not substantially reduce the benefit available to someone else. One ship using a lighthouse signal does not leave less light for the next ship.
These two characteristics produce four ideal types.
| Low rivalry | High rivalry | |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusion difficult | Public good: street lighting, climate stability, some forms of public knowledge | Common-pool resource: fisheries, groundwater, congested public space |
| Exclusion feasible | Club or toll good: subscription services, uncongested toll roads, members’ facilities | Private good: food, clothing, an individual dwelling |
The table is a starting point, not a drawer into which every urban object fits neatly. A road may be largely non-rivalrous at three in the morning and intensely rivalrous during the morning peak. A park may be open to everyone but become congested. Digital information can be copied without depletion, while access to the network carrying it can be restricted. Water stored in an aquifer is a common-pool resource; a piped water service can be metered and disconnected.
Figure 2. Goods move across the grid. Rivalry and excludability are partly material and partly institutional.
Technology, law, pricing and design can alter who may use a good and under which conditions. They cannot make every constraint disappear.
Keep these ideas separate
Several related concepts are routinely bundled together under ‘public goods’. Keeping them separate makes the political choices easier to see.
| Concept | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pure public good | A good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. |
| Public service | A service organised to meet a public responsibility. It may still be rivalrous, excludable or delivered by a non-state organisation. |
| Merit good | A good that public authorities decide should be available more widely than market demand would provide, such as education or preventive healthcare (Musgrave, 1959). |
| Public ownership | Ownership by a state or public body. Public ownership does not guarantee accessible or democratic use. |
| Public value | Value collectively created or pursued through public action, instead of being measured only through financial return (Moore, 1995). |
| Common good | The shared institutions, relationships and conditions that members of a political community have reason and obligations to sustain (Hussain, 2018). |
| Commons | Resources and relationships governed collectively by a community through shared institutions and practices (Ostrom, 1990). |
| Publicness | The degree to which something is accessible, visible, accountable, contestable and open to diverse forms of use and participation (Fraser, 1990; Rocco, 2026). |
A public hospital provides a public service and may be publicly owned. Healthcare is usually rivalrous because professional time, equipment and beds are limited. The public purpose of universal healthcare is nevertheless clear: access to essential care should not depend entirely on purchasing power.
Healthcare is an example of a public good by design (Rocco, 2026). Institutions deliberately organise an essential good so that it serves a broad public purpose, even though its material properties do not make it a pure public good. The label describes a political decision to make something widely accessible. It does not mean that healthcare suddenly becomes non-rivalrous in the strict economic sense. The distinction preserves both economic precision and political ambition.
Why collective provision is necessary
Markets work most directly when providers can charge individual consumers and prevent non-payers from receiving the product. Pure public goods complicate this arrangement because people can benefit without contributing. This is the familiar free-rider problem.
Collective action can respond through taxation, regulation, public investment, compulsory contributions or shared governance. Yet market failure provides only one justification for public goods. Public goods may also be justified because they:
- protect basic rights
- compensate for unequal benefits and burdens created by urbanisation
- enable people to develop and exercise capabilities
- sustain democratic participation
- support social cooperation
- protect ecological systems
- distribute risks that individuals cannot manage alone
Kohn (2020) argues that public goods can be understood through solidarity. Urbanisation and industrialisation produce dense interdependencies, but their benefits and burdens are distributed unequally. Public goods can help compensate for those inequalities, and shared public infrastructure also decommodifies parts of life and creates spaces for politics.
Governments can also fail. Public institutions may underinvest, discriminate, concentrate facilities in politically influential areas, neglect maintenance or transfer control to poorly accountable organisations. The choice is therefore more complicated than ‘market or state’. The relevant questions concern capacity, rights, democratic control, redistribution and accountability.
Public goods have a geography
Many public goods are public only within a particular area. Street lighting benefits people within its reach. A flood barrier protects one territory while possibly redirecting water elsewhere. A library may be formally open to everyone but practically useful mainly to people who can reach it during opening hours (Rocco, 2026).
Spatial planning determines:
- where facilities and infrastructures are located
- which settlements and populations they connect
- which territories remain outside the network
- how long and how much it costs to reach them
- where environmental burdens are displaced
- whether future development will overwhelm capacity
- whether public investment produces displacement or exclusion
A map showing the presence of a school, park or hospital records availability. It does not yet demonstrate accessibility.
Effective access depends on several conditions:
Provision, access and capability are three different achievements. A cycle path provides little mobility to someone who cannot afford a bicycle, fears harassment, cannot physically use a standard bicycle or must travel to destinations the network does not connect. The capability approach therefore asks how resources, personal circumstances and social conditions combine to create substantive freedom (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2009).
Who is ‘the public’?
‘The public’ is often presented as if it were one large person with a single interest. Cities and regions contain many publics, with unequal resources, conflicting needs and different relationships to place. A regional strategy may affect:
Publics may also form around a shared problem. Residents exposed to pollution, tenants threatened with displacement or disabled travellers excluded from transport can organise themselves as political publics. Counterpublics create spaces in which marginalised groups develop interpretations and demands that dominant institutions have ignored (Fraser, 1990).
This matters because public goods have often been distributed through racialised, gendered and colonial definitions of citizenship. Public investment has built prosperous districts while displacing racialised neighbourhoods, appropriating Indigenous territories or relying on poorly paid care and maintenance work.
Feminist political economy adds another correction. Education, health, transport and economic production depend on care and social reproduction. Much of this work has been treated as a private household responsibility and assigned disproportionately to women (Fraser, 2016). A strategy that expands employment while ignoring childcare, care work and everyday mobility may increase economic output while reducing substantive freedom.
Publicness requires more than public ownership
A publicly owned square may be heavily policed, inaccessible to disabled people or designed to discourage young people and unhoused residents. A privately managed space may permit public access, but impose opaque rules and remove users without meaningful appeal.
Publicness should therefore be assessed through several qualities:
open and affordable access
freedom from arbitrary exclusion
accommodation of diverse users and activities
transparent rules
visible responsibility
opportunities to contest decisions
protection of political expression
meaningful influence over change
long-term maintenance and care
Ownership remains significant because it shapes authority and accountability. It does not settle the question by itself. Publicness is produced through rights, design, governance and everyday practice (Rocco, 2026).
From collective need to maintained public benefit
Public benefit does not appear automatically when infrastructure is completed. It must be produced through an entire chain.
Figure 3. The public-goods chain. One link at a time is struck through, with the way it fails. The dashed arrow returns monitoring to the start. On a phone, swipe sideways to see the whole figure.
Every link can fail.
A right may be recognised without funding. Funding may be available without administrative capacity. Infrastructure may be constructed in the wrong place. A service may exist but remain unaffordable. A successful facility may stimulate property speculation and displace the population it was intended to serve. A project may work during its political inauguration and deteriorate quietly after the photographers leave.
Maintenance deserves particular attention. Public goods depend on routine inspection, cleaning, repair, staffing and care. These activities receive less political glamour than construction, but they determine whether public benefit survives (Graham & Thrift, 2007). Ribbon-cuttings are brief. Maintenance is where institutional commitment becomes visible.
The Netherlands is living this problem. Many national bridges, locks, weirs and pumping stations are approaching the end of their service life. In July 2025 the Minister of Infrastructure and Water Management told parliament that the maintenance task is larger than the available budget, that the condition of the networks is visibly and measurably deteriorating, and that funds have already shifted from new construction to maintenance. Maintenance work is to rise to more than €3 billion a year by 2030 (Minister van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat, 2025).
Who pays, and who captures the value?
Public goods can be financed in many ways. Each mechanism distributes costs, risks and authority differently.
A publicly financed metro station can increase surrounding land values. If this uplift accrues mainly to landowners, the public pays while private actors capture much of the gain. Land-value capture can return part of that increase to public investment, but it does not automatically prevent rent increases, speculation or displacement. Housing protection, land policy and anti-displacement measures may still be required.
Dutch municipalities have long practised active land policy: buying land, servicing it and selling building plots, using the proceeds for public investment (Needham, 2014). Before the 2008 crisis this was estimated to bring in over €600 million a year. When housing demand and land prices fell, the same model produced estimated losses of about €2.6 billion in 2010–2012, and most of the small municipalities studied moved to a more passive, facilitating land policy (van Oosten et al., 2018). Value capture carries risk, and someone carries it.
Ask:
Who pays initially?
Who carries financial risk?
Who receives revenue?
Who benefits from rising land values?
Who bears operating and maintenance costs?
What happens when revenue projections fail?
Can affordability survive beyond the pilot phase?
A proposal is not financially just merely because it has found somebody willing to invest.
Why the regional scale matters
Public goods rarely respect municipal boundaries. Labour markets, transport networks, watersheds, housing systems, energy grids and ecosystems operate regionally. Yet political authority, taxation and service responsibilities are often fragmented between municipalities. Four geographies may not coincide.
Benefit
the territory receiving the benefit
Burden
the territory carrying the burden
Decision
the territory making the decision
Finance
the territory financing the intervention
An upstream municipality may restore wetlands that protect downstream settlements. One municipality may build housing used by workers across the region while neighbouring municipalities collect more business taxation. A transit line may serve a regional labour market but depend on several governments with different budgets and priorities.
Regional planning must identify these mismatches. Polycentric governance can connect multiple centres of authority, but decentralisation alone does not guarantee either coordination or justice (Ostrom, 2010). Wealthy municipalities may protect their tax bases and externalise obligations. Local participation may also exclude regional users who are affected but do not have local voting rights.
- the functional territory of the good
- the affected publics
- cross-border benefits and burdens
- responsibilities at each governmental level
- redistributive arrangements between territories
- mechanisms for resolving disagreement
- accountability when several organisations share authority
The Commons page uses a related set of four geographies (resource, dependence, decision, consequence). Here the emphasis falls on who benefits, who pays and who carries the burden.
Overlapping, but not the same
Public-goods theory classifies goods according to rivalry and excludability. Commons theory examines relationships among a resource, a community and the institutions through which that community governs access, use and care (Ostrom, 1990).
A groundwater basin is generally a common-pool resource because extraction by one user can reduce what remains for others. It may be governed as a commons through collectively agreed rules. The same watershed may produce public benefits such as flood regulation, biodiversity and cleaner water.
Climate stability is commonly described as a global public good because its benefits are broadly shared and exclusion is impossible (Kaul et al., 1999). Its production, however, depends on unequal contributions, historical responsibilities and capacities. Calling it ‘global’ should not erase those inequalities.
Land, water and ecosystems are not understood everywhere as goods or resources that stand apart from human communities. Indigenous and relational ontologies may understand them as living relations, territories or beings with reciprocal claims (Escobar, 2018). Some relationships should not be classified as goods at all. Ask whether the language of public goods clarifies a relationship or reduces it to a category derived from Western economics.
Public goods are not automatically just
The word ‘good’ can be misleading. It describes an economic category or a collectively valued outcome, and offers no guarantee of justice.
A motorway may provide regional mobility while exposing particular neighbourhoods to pollution and severance. Flood protection may secure wealthy districts while redirecting risk. A public park may improve environmental quality and accelerate displacement. Public surveillance may be non-rivalrous and widely provided while undermining freedom.
| Dimension | Central question |
|---|---|
| Distributive justice | Who receives the benefits, resources and opportunities, and who carries the burdens and risks? |
| Procedural justice | Who defines the problem, develops alternatives, controls evidence and makes the final decision? |
| Recognitional justice | Whose identities, needs, histories and forms of knowledge are respected or misrepresented? |
| Capability | What are different people actually able to do because of the intervention? |
| Intergenerational and ecological justice | Which costs are transferred to future generations, other territories or ecological systems? |
These dimensions interact. Universal provision without recognition can impose a standard solution that some people cannot use. Participation without redistributive power may leave the allocation unchanged. Redistribution without fair procedure may reproduce technocratic domination (Rocco, 2026; Soja, 2010; Young, 1990).
Four responsibilities of planning
Public goods reveal why planning cannot be reduced to arranging land uses.
Institutional practice
Planning coordinates law, budgets, land, infrastructure and organisations across sectors and scales.
Political practice
Planning helps define which needs become public responsibilities, whose interests receive priority and which trade-offs are considered acceptable.
Professional practice
Planners analyse spatial relationships, develop alternatives, test consequences and translate collective objectives into implementable strategies.
Moral practice
Planning distributes opportunities, risks and resources. Its decisions require public justification, particularly when some groups gain and others carry the burden.
These responsibilities cannot be delegated to a beautiful map.
Three baseline questions, five pathways
Every group should begin with three baseline questions.
What is the promised public outcome?
Name mobility, health, learning, safety, ecological stability or another outcome. Do not simply name the infrastructure.
Who constitutes the relevant public?
Identify the people, territories, future generations and ecological relations affected.
What is the causal mechanism?
Explain how the proposed intervention is expected to produce the promised outcome.
Then choose the pathway that best matches your strategy.
AAccess and capability+
The strategy aims to improve access to housing, services, mobility, education, health or opportunity.
Who can reach, afford, understand and safely use the proposed good? Which conversion barriers remain?
Travel times, costs, service frequency, disability access, opening hours, demographic differences, safety perceptions and service quality.
An effective-access or capability profile showing who can convert provision into real opportunity.
BGovernance and publicness+
The proposal depends on collaboration, public participation, shared ownership or a new governance arrangement.
Who owns, decides, operates and monitors the good? Which decisions can affected groups influence? How can exclusion or failure be contested?
Decision rights, legal mandates, stakeholder power, accountability arrangements and participation records.
A governance map showing authority, responsibility, voice and routes for contestation.
CFinance and value capture+
The strategy depends on major investment, public–private collaboration, user charges or development gains.
Who pays, who assumes risk, who receives revenue and who captures land-value increases? Can affordability and maintenance survive over time?
Budgets, revenue models, land ownership, property-value changes, subsidy arrangements and maintenance liabilities.
A benefit, burden and value-capture account.
DRegional and ecological interdependence+
The intervention crosses municipal boundaries or affects watersheds, ecosystems, energy systems or supply chains.
Where do benefits and burdens travel? Do administrative boundaries match the functioning system? Which responsibilities require regional, national or international coordination?
Flows, ecological systems, commuting patterns, emissions, resource dependencies and intergovernmental mandates.
A functional-territory map linked to a multi-level governance proposition.
EDelivery, maintenance and resilience+
The main risk lies in implementation, institutional capacity or long-term operation.
Who will deliver, staff, repair and adapt the intervention? What happens under financial stress, political change or environmental disruption?
Implementation schedules, organisational capacity, maintenance budgets, workforce arrangements, monitoring systems and contingency plans.
A delivery and stewardship plan extending beyond project completion.
Whichever pathway you select, apply the distributive, procedural and recognitional justice questions. Choosing a pathway reduces overload; it does not provide diplomatic immunity from justice.
Back to the regional railway
Count kilometres of track if you must, but the public outcome is the additional freedom, connection and opportunity the system produces and sustains.
Eleven ways to get it wrong
Treating infrastructure as the public good, instead of as a possible means of producing it.
Assuming that government ownership guarantees accessibility or accountability.
Calling every publicly funded service a pure public good.
Mapping facilities without measuring affordability, quality or usability.
Presenting ‘the public’ as a homogeneous group.
Celebrating local control without examining local exclusion or regional redistribution.
Counting participation while leaving decision authority unchanged.
Ignoring operation, care and maintenance.
Socialising investment risk while allowing private actors to capture most of the value.
Treating land, water and ecological relations only as resources available for human use.
Assuming that a collectively provided good must produce fair outcomes.
What you should produce
A public-goods proposition for a regional strategy should state:
A plausible strategy should also explain what happens when assumptions fail. Public goods require institutions capable of learning, not merely a confident arrow pointing towards 2050.
Made public, kept public
A strategy can contain public investment, public infrastructure and the word ‘inclusive’ seventeen times without producing much public benefit.
The harder test is whether it creates shared conditions that diverse inhabitants can actually use, distributes benefits and burdens fairly, remains open to democratic challenge, and protects the ecological relations on which collective life depends.
Public goods do not end with provision. They must be made public, kept public and repeatedly justified.
Where to go next
A short path into the field. Full references are below.
A spatial planning guide to public goods: the primary source for this page.
The original economic definition.
Public goods as solidarity and social justice.
Merit goods and public finance.
Public value in government.
Why repair and maintenance matter.
Global public goods.
Beyond resources: designs for the pluriverse.
The texts behind this page
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371816
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/466240
Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care Accessed on: 15 October 2026.
Graham, S., & Thrift, N. (2007). Out of order: Understanding repair and maintenance. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954
Hussain, W. (2018). The common good. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2018 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/common-good/ Accessed on: 15 October 2026.
Kaul, I., Grunberg, I., & Stern, M. A. (Eds.). (1999). Global public goods: International cooperation in the 21st century. Oxford University Press.
Kohn, M. (2020). Public goods and social justice. Perspectives on Politics, 18(4), 1104–1117. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592719004614
Minister van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat. (2025, July 1). Meerjarenplan instandhouding Rijkswaterstaat 2025–2030 (Kamerstuk 29 385, nr. 143). Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal. https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/kst-29385-143.pdf Accessed on: 15 October 2026.
Moore, M. H. (1995). Creating public value: Strategic management in government. Harvard University Press.
Musgrave, R. A. (1959). The theory of public finance: A study in public economy. McGraw-Hill.
Needham, B. (2014). Dutch land-use planning: The principles and the practice. Ashgate.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763
Ostrom, E. (2010). Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641
Rocco, R. (2026). A spatial planning guide to public goods: Designing, implementing, and sustaining public goods for equitable cities and communities. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-2251-4
Samuelson, P. A. (1954). The pure theory of public expenditure. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 36(4), 387–389. https://doi.org/10.2307/1925895
Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press.
van Oosten, T., Witte, P., & Hartmann, T. (2018). Active land policy in small municipalities in the Netherlands: ‘We don’t do it, unless…’. Land Use Policy, 77, 829–836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.10.029
Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.