We're losing the art of public interaction. The spaces - from a public park to a forum for public exchange - where social debate and contemplation can take place are eroding before our eyes. Two very disparate and under-reported initiatives were launched last week, both rooted in this concern - precursors perhaps of the beginning of civil society's fight back. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) delivered its manifesto for better public spaces, saying that a combination of powerful private interests, aggressive litigiousness and timidity by public authorities were together undermining public space.  Suffolk County Council's infamous decision to outlaw hanging baskets from some lampposts in Bury St Edmunds is the most graphic example of the general trend. Fear that the baskets might fall and hurt someone, sparking an expensive compensation claim, had forced the county council to act. Nor is it an idle fear. Manchester City Council's budget for compensation claims now exceeds its budget for repairing pavements - also, ironically, the source of many claims for compensation.  All around the country, according to Cabe, boating lakes, markets, adventure playgrounds, and public parks are under growing threat because they are deemed too risky in the face of claims for compensation from some aggrieved injured litigant or that they are too expensive to protect from the ambitions of private developers - and there is too little protest about the wider cost to us of access being reduced or even phased out altogether.  Yet there is a wealth of evidence that being able to stroll in a park and breathe good air prolongs life expectancy; that having somewhere to play reduces kids' obesity; that having wide pavements and well-lit bus stops reduces crime. It is worth paying to have park keepers, finding funds to pay compensation and imposing the planning controls to protect public space. Such things enhance our lives. By refusing to pay for our public sphere we collude in undermining it.  The Royal Society of Arts is worried that our well-being is under equal pressure from another source. We are losing the capacity to engage in anything other than private conversation about private passions; even public debate is increasingly about our private loves, hates and emotions - and when public debate is about something public, say the European constitution, or even the decline in public space, it is conducted in a way designed not to illuminate or inform.  There is certainly no dialogue; it is two sides duelling, holding their views with unshakeable and unchanging conviction, giving no quarter and spinning every fact with a vengeance, with the   public cast as onlookers to a gladiatorial spectacle. Their role is to enjoy the sparks rather than learn or modify their opinions in the light of the evidence.  The RSA's response is to launch a national series of coffee-house debates based on the coffee-house out of which it was born 250 years ago.  It wants to recreate the capacity to be engaged in public affairs, and that means, believes Britain's most venerable think-tank, that we need to acquire again the art of thinking aloud about public issues in an environment where you are not pounced on for making a mistake, not toeing the party line or excoriated for saying something illogical.  Creative conversation, when it happens, is intoxicating; interlocuters inspire and fire new thoughts in each other. Let us hope that we all know this sensation; but nobody would say good conversation characterises our current public realm. The Royal Society wants us to talk in today's coffee-houses - 500 Starbucks - and email them the results of our conversations.  I welcome both initiatives. We are locked in a vicious circle, in which declining public space begets the very excessive individualism that feeds self-interested litigiousness and the bear-baiting, take-no-prisoners attitude towards public debate.  What drives the compensation culture is the decline in people's sense of belonging to a wider public culture. This fuels a disproportionate sense of personal injury - along with the prospect of some easy money.  Equally, media interviews where the interviewer sets out to entrap and draw blood do nothing to enlarge public understanding - but that is because the listener and viewer collude in seeing the Minister, MP or official in the same way as the media. That is, not as legitimate representatives of a public realm that can only be sustained in the last resort if we respect it; rather, as somebody we want to see discomfited or commit a gaffe. Public life has become a kind of soap opera in which issues are less important than the private foibles, wobbles and passions of the actors in the drama.  Charles Kennedy's sweating or Michael Portillo's gay experiences are one part of this - the other is extraordinary over-exaggeration. There are 12 weeks to stop a European superstate; MMR vaccine causes autism; the Six Nations rugby tournament is bankrupt as a sports spectacle. Choose your issue and you know what I mean.  Even as I write this I'm aware of the counter arguments; the public parks I know well seem in rude good health. And if some toffs are complaining about the vulgarity and prurience of the British media, it was ever thus. The greater truth is its vitality - and people have the wit to see through the hype. Public debate is always going to be edgy with debaters probing for any advantage they can; to imagine it should be conducted as some glorified seminar is to bay for the moon.  And why shouldn't we be interested in the personal dimensions of our public figures?  And yet I stick to my guns. There is a rise in the compensation culture and there is a degradation in how public argument is conducted. What connects them both is a diminishing sense of why what we hold in common is as important to our well-being as the freedom to pursue our self-interest and accent only the personal. And this disappearing collectivity is, for example, why the BBC is under assault; it is why, in a larger sense, we are so bad-tempered and ill at ease with ourselves.  But the desire for better co-exists with the same trends. Thus Cabe and the RSA last week. Thus the polls that simultaneously show huge support for the BBC even while it is denigrated. Thus the periodic interest in the idea of new newspapers (the latest is Stephen Glover's the  World) which are built on public interest and impartial news journalism.  Such tensions are a feature of the age. The idea of 'the public' is too weak. It is only if we recognise that and fight back to restore its place that we have any hope of reasserting the values that are, literally, good for us all.  I am on the side of those who want to fight back.