About a year into his term as mayor, Eric Adams created a new position in his administration to improve the quality of public space in New York City. Chief Public Realm Officer Ya-Ting Liu, a transportation policy advocate with a background in conservation and planning, now works in the office of Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi. In June, Liu issued a report, “Realm of Possibility: 15 Ways NYC is Improving Public Space for New Yorkers,” sharing her vision for implementing the nation’s best outdoor dining program, removing sidewalk sheds, planting more street trees, renovating and building more public restrooms, opening schoolyards to the public after-hours, and activating and upgrading public spaces.
How and why was the position of chief public realm officer created, and what is your role?
Since the 2021 election cycle, there’s always been a handful of organizations calling for City Hall to have a more intentional and centralized coordination effort concerning public space management. That was at the height of the pandemic, when the city was reeling—and because everything was shut down, the value of public spaces came into sharper relief at that time.
When Mayor Adams came into office in 2022, advocates pulled together an effort called “New New York.” It called for the creation of a director of the public realm at City Hall to do that coordination work and create a set of priorities for what I call the “spaces between buildings”—from the street to the curb to the sidewalk. How do we manage and prioritize those very precious spaces that have a lot of demands on them?
In your report, you discuss reducing costs through coordination across agencies or using more efficient procurement processes. What tools are available—or are you creating—that will enable that to happen more fluidly?
This has been a professional and personal learning curve for me, coming inside government and understanding the Byzantine rules involved in how the city builds anything. Some of the tools are legislative action we need from Albany to allow city agencies to do things like design-build, for example. That effort is being spearheaded by Deputy Mayor Joshi, with a lot of legislative asks from Albany that we’ve won in the last couple of sessions, and outstanding items that we still need.
In terms of my team, we’ve created standing meetings with all the capital agencies that are building things, adding to the public- space footprint of the city: Department of Parks, Department of Transportation (DOT), Department of Design and Construction, Department of Environmental Protection. We all meet regularly, and some of the tools are just making sure agencies are prioritizing these public-space projects, giving City Hall regular updates on where they stand, and whether there are delays. It’s not sexy or a magic bullet, but it involves project management and being hypervigilant about where we are with things.
What are your plans to reduce the city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds?
This is definitely one of our top-top priorities, and it is also a quintessential, perennial, and seemingly exceptional New York City issue that has plagued all the administrations of the past. What we are doing is multipronged. Number one, we need stronger carrots and sticks at the Department of Buildings (DOB) to make sure building owners are better incentivized and motivated to take down the scaffolding. As long as the cost to put up scaffolding is cheaper than the underlying façade repair work they have to address, they will always try to put it off and forget about it. And the current permitting and fine process incentivizes building owners to do that.
Right now, we have a package of legislation before the City Council that will give DOB a lot more tools and change the reporting and fee structure for building owners. Some of these bills would require building owners to keep showing proof that they’re either actively doing or making a good faith effort to do the underlying repair work, or the fines for keeping up scaffolding will grow. That’s one way: right-sizing the incentive structure.
The second is around design. Under the Bloomberg Administration, there was a design competition for sidewalk sheds, and the winner was the Urban Umbrella. That competition resulted in a monopoly of one company having the intellectual property rights for that design, so it’s seen as a luxury product that only high-end buildings can afford. The DOB has recently selected ARUP and PAU as two firms to present new designs. The intellectual property would be owned by the city, and we would make that available to everybody. The idea is that once we have some design standards in place, we would pursue legislation that would require the new designs going forward.
Can you talk about street tree plantings and aspects of water containment that are supposed to alleviate stormwater runoff and combined sewer overflows?
Every time DOT is looking to create a new pedestrian plaza, or the parks team is building a new playground or doing a renovation, we ask them, “What can we do to make it as water-absorbent as possible? What are we doing to make these assets more resilient? How can we create more shaded areas and reduce the heat island effect?
What do you hope to accomplish in your role, and how would you like the city to eventually look and feel?
I think about prioritizing public space management through what I call hardware, software, and “org-ware.” When it comes to hardware, it’s a lot of this capital stuff we were talking about at the be- ginning. Software gets into all the programming and maintenance work. Is it well maintained? Is it clean? Are interesting things happening in the space? That is critical, because you can build a brand-new plaza, but if it’s filled with trash, no one is going to use it. The software piece is just as important; it is not sexy, and hard to fund, but it is absolutely critical. The city relies on partners to do this work: business improvement districts, friends of parks groups, conservancies, neighborhood groups. But for partners who want to host an open street or do maintenance and programming, we make it very hard for them, so that’s been a real focus of ours. We need these partners—how do we make it easier for them?
And lastly, “org-ware” is more internal. How do you ensure this focus lasts through different administrations? The priority and emphasis always come from the mayor, deputy mayors, and senior levels of the administration. If the senior executive team is not focused on it, you won’t have a lot of juice or resources in your own office. The fact that the deputy mayor for operations has prioritized this has enabled us to do a lot in a short amount of time.
Vishaan Chakrabarti’s latest book, The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy (Princeton University Press, 2024), is intended to be an argument with his first book, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for Urban America (Metropolis Books, 2013). Over the past decade, he has taken several cross-country trips through the middle of the U.S.—including several towing an Airstream trailer, during the pandemic, accompanied by his son—and has embarked on a number of projects in Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Niagara Falls that have brought him closer to Middle America. Chakrabarti emphatically believes that forms of density adequate for walkability and well-designed public spaces that encourage the experience of cultural difference are possible and economically viable in small towns, as well as large ones. The Architecture of Urbanity sets out to show how graciously designed places and good public policy can help.
What do you mean by “architecture of urbanity”?
The first book argued for the merits of density, especially transit-oriented density. Since then, the issue of density, even what people today call “gentle density,” has entered our political culture wars. A lot of reasonable people said, “Look, we get the technocratic argument about why urban growth is good, but most new urban development is terrible.”
I found that hard to argue with. Most new urban development is pretty terrible. I wanted to do a second book about the role design plays in urban growth being successful or unsuccessful, from large-scale urban and regional moves, like transit systems, all the way down to where you put a doorknob. This book is much lighter on infographics and data, but it is much heavier on an argument not just for design, but why design matters to the big pressing issues of our day, specifically climate change and social division.
Another term that threads its way through a lot of the chapters is “connective tissue.”
Yes, connective tissue and connective design. Connective design is the term of art that the book uses quite a bit. I believe people will be much more accepting of urban growth if it’s not just designed well, but designed to connect people to their places, and to the narratives and identities of their places. Take the Domino Sugar Refinery, for example. That building can’t be anywhere else. Even though parts of it are very futuristic and forward-looking, the building pulls history forward with it. It connects people to a sense of what makes New York New York, our industrial legacy, and this sense that it can’t just be picked up and moved anywhere. This is one of the biggest challenges we face as designers today, because materials are mass-produced and, especially when it comes to housing, it’s all becoming very generic.
Part of why there’s community pushback about new housing density is that people see buildings going up in their neighborhoods, and they feel they are losing their sense of where they are and who they are. Connective design is meant to cover quite a broad range of ideas. Some of them are at the scale of urban planning and urban design. I’m trying to take it a step further and put it squarely in the realm of architecture. I don’t mean postmodern historicism; the easiest reference point in terms of architectural theory is actually critical regionalism. If you think of the work of Francis Kéré, Alejandro Aravena, Tatiana Bilbao, or Marina Tabassum, the through line is that it’s unabashedly contemporary: I don’t think you could ever call it historicist or pastiche, but it is also trying to be place-based. Their work is trying to respond to a certain sense of not just immediate physical context, but cultural context, and most of it is pretty mission-driven.
There is a major shift in the profession away from object-based architecture and into different forms of what it means to be a successful architect. It’s not just virtue signaling, but it’s what we do in the profession and the communities we help to build. The larger sociopolitical issue is that architecture is a counterpoint or antidote to the political and cultural division that social media has brought.
A lot of the work my office is doing is in the industrial Midwest, where the blue pixels and the red pixels meet. I just finished my sixth cross-country trip, so I know the middle of the country really well. The last couple of times I’ve done it, my son and I have pulled an Airstream we bought during the pandemic. We, at Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), won the Miller Prize in Columbus, Indiana, for this wonderful canopy structure in the heart of Columbus. We have a bridge under construction in Indianapolis; we’re doubling the size of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, originally the I.M. Pei building. We’re working in downtown Niagara Falls.
A lot of these communities are different scales, they’re in different parts of the country, but they have certain aspects in common: downtowns that were hollowed out by shopping malls and e-commerce. They are cities, but they’re not exclusively liberal, progressive cities. If we can create spaces where people of difference can see each other and attract each other, they begin to understand that people who look different or pray differently are not the threat that social media makes them out to be. This is why I think these spaces are so important to the times we live in. Even in the middle of a presidential election with heated political debate, it’s really, really important, because my experience with this country is that it’s nowhere near as divided culturally as we are told every day and made to believe.
Berit Lavender is the executive director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The center serves as a theoretical and applied research platform for creating and disseminating knowledge for affecting change in the urbanized world. Before stepping into her new role in August, Berit was co-director of DESIGNxRI and, prior to that, spent eight years as director of exhibitions and programs at New York’s Center for Architecture.
Tell us about the LCAU—how it is structured and what its mission is.
The LCAU was founded just over 10 years ago. It’s a center at MIT, which means we are not a department, and we are not housed within a department. We’re housed within the School of Architecture and Planning, and we are independent—but independent while striving to be multidisciplinary. Our goal is to address forward-thinking urban issues at a variety of scales through collaborations with interdisciplinary experts. We have 40-plus affiliated faculty, primarily from Architecture and Planning, but we try to bring in educators from across the university. We just gave out some large seed grants that included faculty in computer science. Of course, at MIT there are so many smart people doing such a variety of things—the ultimate goal is to get as many fields as possible interested in connecting to research around creating livable cities.
What are some of the top concerns the LCAU is focused on right now?
The LCAU develops themes, which we focus on for roughly two years. The first theme back in 2012 was infrastructure. Then we looked at suburbia, housing, and equitable resilience. And we’re now coming off the end of digital urbanism, which feeds into the background of current faculty director, Sarah Williams, who leads the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT. These themes aren’t going to go away. We are still looking at housing, of course, and are doing a project right now on equitable resilience, which focuses on how cities can prepare now for a form of future resilience that avoids some of the current pitfalls that have resulted in displaced communities. And digital urbanism, which examines the intersection of cities, technology, and design, in some ways touches almost everything we do.
Tell us about some of LCAU’s recent or current initiatives.
While our themes help us home in on particular topics, we also are in tune with critical, timely issues that might not fit into a given focus—we are very broad. For example, we just received funding to look at access to food and water in a settlement in Colombia. Public space is always an important topic—right now we’re wrapping up a project in Australia with the University of New South Wales, for which we deployed street seats with sensors to understand how people were interacting with them. While in some cases our research can be informed by grants we apply for, we are fortunate in that we also distribute funding, so we’re able to be very nimble in creating our calls. We just did a round of seed grants where we collaborated with global engineering, architecture, and consultancy firm Sidara to solicit proposals for experimenting with novel forms of knowledge and data, generating innovative urban solutions.
What lies ahead for you in your new role?
We’re announcing a new theme in December, which we developed with our affiliated faculty, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that deploys. After launching the new theme, we’ll announce the third round of the Leventhal City Prize, which is open to urbanists, architects, and planners. The first round went to a project called the Malden River Works, in Massachusetts, which recently got funding to be built. It’s super exciting to know we funded this idea that will become a reality. The second round was New York-based. It was a collaboration between MIT faculty, the NYC Housing Authority, and the non-profit Green City Force. I’m excited to see what this next round of proposals will consider. And, more generally, moving ahead in my new role, I’m looking forward to playing a small part in highlighting cutting-edge urban research around the globe.
BETH BROOME (Interview with Berit Lavender) is the former managing editor of Architectural Record and a writer based in Brooklyn.
STEPHEN ZACKS (Interviews with Vishaan Chakrabarti and Ya-Ting Liu) is an advocacy journalist, architecture critic, urbanist, and project organizer based in New York City.