b'Going Public - in whose interest?Is your project private? Lets say the developer of your project is a private entrepreneur and the lender is a private company. They are carrying out the project on a privately-owned site. The principal investor is a private entity. So its private? Only to that limited extent.Your project has significant impacts outside the private site, both positive and negative, on immediate neighbours, and on owners, occupiers, visitors and businesses in the district if not beyond; it showers impacts on public land, Jeremy Dawkins community spaces and social infrastructure; and for these reasons its purpose, scale and form are determined by the rules and decisions of public regulators. In short, a private site in the city is not what it seems. It is a defined area with specific property rights, but functionally it is continuous with all of the land around it. It is true that control of the property comes with a bundle of rights that allows the holder of those rights to make many decisions, such as developing or not developing the site; holding, leasing or selling it; transferring the rights in other ways, including to a lender in exchange for a mortgage. Furthermore, these rights are not confined to capitalist or mixed economies. Many of these rights are held over comparable urban property regardless of the social system and the extent to which urban land is socialised or nationalised.On the other hand, what you can do with these rights, and specifically how you can use and develop your site, is inherently public.You (and all those who come to your site) depend on having access to a public street and other public urban services (irrespective of who owns them).The best use of your site depends on everything around it, typically confirmed by the rules and decisions of the public regulators (whether governments or corporations).Your site sits in a mosaic of property rights, which are interdependent and reciprocal, as defined by public regulators. Lawyers tend to say that the regulators restrict the development potential of urban land, by taking away property rights. This might reflect the view of a single owner, but does not reflect the reality facing all owners. A restriction on one is a protection for others; a 85P3-20200301-SYDNEY STUDIO.indd 50 2020/3/8 11:23:36'