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LONDON — Today Turkey, tomorrow Maine?

Holly Selliger, an Occupy activist writing in The Portland Press Herald, believes the Turkish protest movement that began as a bid to save an Istanbul park could reverberate as far as the Pine Tree State.

“From Congress Square Park in Portland to Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey, the global fight to save public space has begun,” wrote Ms. Selliger, who campaigns to save a city square in her hometown from being turned into a ballroom.

Although it may be a while before we see tear gas and water cannons on the streets of Portland, known as the Forest City, Ms. Selliger offers a reminder that the concerns about shrinking public space are global.

Will Hutton, a columnist for The Observer, wrote on Sunday about the loss of public space in Britain to commercial developers who have created large office and mall projects like London’s Canary Wharf.

“They want to be free to configure where we walk, what we visit and who has access because thus they can maximize sales per square foot of shopping and rents,” Mr. Hutton wrote.

He quoted Anna Minton, a British policy analyst who has criticized the privatization of public space in London and other cities.

“The privatization of the public realm, through the growth of ‘private-public’ space, produces overcontrolled, sterile places which lack connection to the reality and diversity of the local environment, with the result that they all tend to look the same,” Ms. Minton wrote in a report for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. “They also raise serious questions about democracy and accountability.”

Campaigners lament the growth of gated communities and closed malls, which in many areas have replaced open streets and public markets, as well as the proliferation of private security guards and CCTV monitoring.

“We’re in the middle of a creeping privatization of public space,” The Guardian wrote a year ago in an appeal to readers to track the changes in their neighborhoods. “Streets and open spaces are being defined as private land after redevelopment.”

Such concerns reflect those of the original Istanbul protest, which was sparked by a government plan to uproot many trees at the city’s Gezi Park for the reconstruction of a historic military barracks, with the possibility of adding a shopping mall.

Vancouver’s The Mainlander — which issued its own “it could happen here” warning — said the message from Gezi Park resonated in a Canadian city “quietly yet quickly in the process of being transformed into a resort for the wealthy.”

The public versus private debate has been at the root of many of the Occupy movement protests that sprang from the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space.

Concerns about urban development and the loss of public space are not new.

As Joni Mitchell wrote in “Big Yellow Taxi”, inspired in 1970 by urban blight in Hawaii, “They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.”

And in a verse that might still inspire defenders of public space from Istanbul to Portland, she sang, “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum/Then they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em.”

Do you worry that cities are losing their public realms to private development? Or are public-private partnerships a sound strategy to ensure the maintenance of spaces that can be used by everyone? Let us know your views.

