What does 'public area' mean?

Everywhere in the world, the issue of how to manage urban growth poses the highest stakes, complex policy decisions, and strongly heated conflicts in the public area. The contrast between Western Europe and America is particularly sharp. In Western Europe, steep gasoline taxes, investment policies favoring built-up areas over undeveloped greenfields, continuous investment in public transportation, and other policies have produced relatively compact cities. Cities in Western Europe tend to be economically healthy compared with their suburbs. By contrast, in the United States, cheap gas, massive highway investment, policies that favor construction on the edges of cities, and heavy reliance on property taxes to fund public schools have encouraged much more car-reliant and spread-out urban areas, where eight in ten Americans now live.