When talking about public spaces, I'm certain that the big reason is corruption of the financial sort. At least in my part of the world, the local government i

When talking about public spaces, I'm certain that the big reason is corruption of the financial sort. At least in my part of the world, the local government is in charge of public works. Be it streetlights, walkways, fountains, signs, roads or whatever. They do these things via public tenders and its always about the lowest bidder. "For X amount of money we need a walkway from here to here." In most of the cases the winner is secretly decided in advance, work gets eventually done and the public get the walkway. Everything included in that walkway will be of the poorest quality, badly finished, crude, and ugly. You may say: "Oh but it was cheap at least, so many of those public works can be done". Wrong! Its super expensive, kickbacks eat most of it. No wonder the politicians (both local and state wide) and their friends live like kings. A bit paradoxically, when talking about buildings done with public money like schools, museums, hospitals, gov buildings etc, those usually look like from an architect's wet dream and I don't think many countries can/want to match that. The reason still is corruption. An eg kindergarden made today costs ridiculous amounts of money and "needs" an architectural studio with renown so they come up with a design which is usually very expensive. The building gets built as cheap as possible, and no amount of money is saved for future maintenance.