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Cities express the tension between private interests and the common good, between buildings and public space. New York, the most populous city in the US, enjoys an abundance of impressive, exclusive structures (and quite a few impressive public ones, most of them built in the mid-20th century) while lacking high-quality, accessible open space.

This is despite a stock of undervalued public space: streets. 

In fact, according to New York’s own Department of Transportation (DOT), twenty-seven percent of the city is filled by streets, which together constitute a very underutilized public right of way. A study by the City University of New York’s Baruch College calculated that this area makes up 64 square miles of land—enough to fit about 50 Central Parks.

In New York, as in all cities, public interests inform building regulations; conversely, private interests inform the management of public space. Unfortunately, the public interests that mostly dictate the use of this broad swath of the city are not unified. They mostly concern transportation and waste management.

This is because the de facto managers of the public realm in the city of eight million are the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Department of Sanitation (DOS), whose priorities include, unsurprisingly, traffic and trash.

Furthermore, according to Open Plans’ Streetsblog publisher, Mark Gorton, this has only become direr during the pandemic: The lack of oversight of streets as places has resulted in an “anarchy, a free-for-all” that has only gotten worse as more users—including the freight-deliverers of burgeoning e-commerce, deliveristas on e-bikes, assisted-mobility users, and users of micro-mobility devices—are jostling for space in streets that for decades have been dominated by private vehicles. 

For this reason, Open Plans, a public space advocacy group, says the city must create an Office of Public Space Management (OPSM).

According to the group, the city “has struggled to manage its streets as public spaces.” Where sanitation and transportation do not govern, the city has relinquished its management of valuable, central areas to business interests, allowing them to be managed by Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and “Friends of” groups. 

There are a total of 76 BIDs in NY, and together with “Friends of” groups, they control approximately two percent of the city’s streets, albeit in high-traffic areas like Union Square, Times Square, and other commercial areas throughout the five boroughs. 

Because these groups generally have property owners and business people’s interests in mind, there is essentially nobody with direct accountability whose mandate is to manage and maintain the other 98%—the remaining public open space in New York City.

Proposals, such as 25x25, which was proposed by Transportation Alternatives, seek to radically reorganize the public realm in favor of people over cars. An Office of Public Space Management would be a critical part of this transformation: Both groups believe that the city must rethink the use of streets as its largest asset, one that should be designed and managed with people in mind, not just as conduits for vehicles, goods, and waste. Streets have to be thought of as places.

...the city must rethink the use of streets as its largest asset, one that should be designed and managed with people in mind, not just as conduits for vehicles, goods, and waste. Streets have to be thought of as places.

Public space managers see the design of public space as the ongoing maintenance, upkeep, and functioning of places, not just physical characteristics of a space when it is initially opened to the public. 

Where architects see post-occupancy, public space managers like Open Plans’ Jackson Chabot see placemaking, the management of, and care for physical settings that host human activity unfolding over time.

With an area the size of 50 Central Parks that includes an impressive stock of existing structures, a would-be OPSM would have a daunting task to coordinate the various streets, parks, plazas, and other assorted public structures, many of them in varying degrees of disrepair.

To manage such a large area in NY, the OPSM would divide the city into a series of Public Space Management Sectors, each with local officials responsible for literally walking through their area to ensure compliance with high-level goals and standards.

One of the first orders of business would be to have the DOT create a map of “street hierarchy” to understand which streets are critical for vehicular traffic and which ones are important for pedestrians. This would result in more open streets and plazas in areas that make sense, like blocks that contain a school.

Furthermore, the office would ramp up enforcement to avoid the kind of stretching of the rules and flat-out non-compliance that many developers, architects, and property owners have enjoyed with programs such as New York’s Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPs). These were created in exchange for being granted more floor area ratio (FAR) to allow additional, lucrative, upper-level floors on their buildings. 

Chabot points to 6 ½ Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, where a string of POPs runs from West 51st Street to W 57th Street. Many of these ostensibly public spaces which run below Midtown's towering skyscrapers are furnished interiors that intentionally belie their public nature.

Chabot believes this is the kind of shenanigans that an OPSM could help to prevent.

Indeed, the creation of the new office might be a boon to urban designers and architects who wish to make New York’s open spaces equitable, the challenge hinges on the mayor, who Open Plans believes must approve the new position. Because the current departments of Sanitation, Environment, Transportation, Design, Planning, and Buildings—just to name some—are all headed by mayoral appointees, who gets appointed may be as important as the would-be post they would occupy.