Rethinking the Governance of Streets and Sidewalks in NYC by Starting with Social and Community Life

During the pandemic, regulations on outdoor dining were relaxed because indoor dining was unsafe. Soon, 13,000 outdoor dining sheds were built to save the city's social and commercial life. Limiting top down governance and control at that delicate time gave business owners the freedom to set up outdoor dining areas in a way that best suited their offerings and neighborhood context, in response to the needs and wants of their customers. It unleashed an organic process of creativity that led to thriving places.

Not only that, but each new dining shed inspired the development of others around it, creating a virtuous cycle of neighborhood improvement. Through "reciprocal gestures" (where adjacent businesses get inspired by their neighbors' improvements to make their own similar changes) businesses engaged in a kind of friendly competition to make their offerings better and better, thus elevating whole streets and blocks, which benefited entire communities. The outdoor dining initiative exceeded all expectations. Streets came alive. People happily flocked to these places. Communities flourished.

And then they were taken down.

When the pandemic ended, strict regulations on outdoor dining were reinstated to quell the complaints of drivers who wanted their parking spots back. And so these incredible new hubs of social life that had flowered from the ashes of the crisis were torn away from the residents who had grown to love them. After the implementation of numerous rules, fees, and burdensome administrative processes, most businesses could not justify keeping their dining structures. As a result, much of NYC's streets returned to their dull, uninspiring, and car-centric state when for a brief period they had been brilliant public places.

That brief period – when regulations were lifted and control of the street was given to the community – taught us that perhaps the standard form of public place governance isn't always what's best for cities. Top down control is often too rigid to support the kind of dynamic changes and improvements that lead a city toward evolution and progress. It suffocates creativity, improvisation, and community engagement. What we need is more involvement by the people on the ground who will be most impacted by changes made to the city at eye level.

Where Government Falls Short

If we want to stimulate neighborhood vibrancy by encouraging community engagement, we need new models for maintaining, governing and supporting it. Even when driven by good intentions, the current approach of governments to addressing local problems is too siloed, too inflexible and stifled by bureaucracy, and totally disconnected from the wants and needs of the communities they affect.

What we need to do is realign government efforts with community needs. We need government to not be structured around the fixed plans of rigid disciplines and professions but rather around outcomes – first asking the question of "what is the outcome we want in this community?" and then taking a more open-minded, holistic, and flexible approach to achieving it by working together with the people who will be most impacted.

What we have found is that the outcomes we seek, especially in regard to creating built environments that people thrive in and love, can be best achieved by engaging and empowering community members. Community-led improvisation is key, along with the kinds of partnerships with government where leaders hold more of a managing role than a controlling one. These are core tenets of Placemaking.

Why Placemaking?

Placemaking is a process where the community works together to shape their public places, often with support or resources from business owners, governments, and other relevant stakeholders. When the community is at the head of a project, it is much more likely to be successful, well-received, well-maintained, and better integrated into the fabric of the community. That's because community members know best what their community needs.

New York's outdoor dining sheds were integral to helping communities heal from the pandemic. Not only that, but they brought to life once dull and hostile streets. Placemaking could be seen everywhere in how each custom dining shed reflected its local culture and context. Business owners adapted their constructions according to customer feedback and neighborhood character, creating places that resonated with the community and where people loved to gather and connect, even during the toughest of times. It was Placemaking at its finest.

We have seen the power of Placemaking and community engagement in countless instances around the world, serving to revitalize parks, sidewalks, streets, squares, and more. A short documentary recently came out about our work leading the Placemaking movement for the last 50 years, and we have held two successful Global Placemaking Summits in Mexico City (2023) and Toronto (2025) to train community leaders and formulate the movement's next steps. Placemaking has proven to be immensely successful in creating the outcomes communities want and it will only keep growing in influence and impact. City leadership needs to recognize this.

Moving Away from Traditional Governance

What has the traditional government-led design and planning of cities gotten us? In the past seventy years, it has gotten us countless overly wide, hostile streets cutting through the heart of the city and narrow sidewalks where hardly anything happens. It has gotten us blocks with no character, dominated by generic big business storefronts. It has gotten us soulless public places that do not attract the public. In other words, it has all too often gotten us outcomes that we do not enjoy, that are not safe, pleasant, or comfortable, and that negatively impact our quality of life.

"Turn everything upside down to get it right side up to get from inadequate to extraordinary"

Naturally, if we want to achieve the opposite, we need to do the opposite. We should try putting top-down governance in the passenger seat when it comes to local matters, and behind the wheel put the people who best understand what their communities need to not only survive but to thrive – the people who live and work there.

The way to do that is by encouraging community-led improvisation. During our travels, the most magical and memorable street life moments have been where the street performers are and where the placemaking is. That is why we like to say, "if architecture is frozen music and planning is composition, placemaking is improvisational street performance." It's not top-down fixed and planned approaches that make the magic happen, it's improvisation on the ground level by community members who care. We need to center our future around local improvisation and reciprocal gestures to create dynamic, unique environments that resonate with their context. The sidewalks are a great place to start.

Marco Polo recent improvements create a strong destination os Court Street. It has joiners in giving an identity to Court Street that puts it on the list of best neighborhood streets in Brooklyn.

Sidewalks are the most important public spaces in the city

Sidewalks are the most important public spaces in any community, big and small. They are where social and commercial life takes place. The sidewalks are where chance encounters occur, where people are exposed to social life, where most of our public activity happens. People spend a significant part of every day on the sidewalks in and around where they live, work, hang out, pray, etc. or around the neighborhoods and attractions they explore.

Sidewalks are the least understood and most overlooked public places and have always been the lowest priority in urban areas, despite the fact that they are the arteries for community and economic activity. There is no discipline that defines them, no agency that creates or supports them, even though the social life of humans is vitally important to society's functioning and much of that takes place on sidewalks.

The addition of social hubs brought so much new life to our communities that for many people they became beloved community institutions. The places where people linger and hang out on the sidewalk rather than briskly walk along it, are also where people become more aware of the hostility of dangerous streets and intersections. Overly wide intersections in the middle of our cities are where our neighbors are killed crossing the street. Sidewalks that are cracked or broken are dangerous to walk on, especially for the elderly. Sidewalks that are too narrow are where pedestrians are forced to be dangerously close to speeding cars. When we start to see the value of sidewalks and spend more time there, we also start to see the issues that plague them...

So Whose Responsibility Are Sidewalks?

The natural follow-up question is – who is responsible for the activation and social life of our sidewalks? The answer is no one. In NYC, NYCDOT has taken up the dining shed issue because the sheds are located on streets, but historically the DOT's role has been to move as many cars as possible around at the expense of everything else that happens on the street. While the DOT is beginning to change and understand the importance of sidewalks – making more strides to activate them than it ever has before – it still does not make sense for them to be responsible for nurturing sidewalk life considering their priority is to serve the needs of drivers and traffic. Alas, this priority is spelled out in the name of the organization itself – the Department of Transportation. It is not called the Department of Social Life.

Perhaps we need a Department of Social Life. Humans are social beings and as such, social life is a vital component to maintaining a healthy and well-functioning society. Why then is no one responsible for creating opportunities for social connection in our cities? This lack of attention to social life has plunged the United States into an epidemic of loneliness, as recently announced by the Surgeon General himself, and there are numerous very serious associated health problems to this epidemic, including significantly higher risk of death and billions of dollars lost in productivity. We are in the midst of a crisis of disconnection, yet we continue to erase opportunities for connecting, especially on our most extensive public spaces – the sidewalks.

Somebody needs to be responsible for addressing this issue. An organization dedicated specifically to this cause is required, not one that has its main priority elsewhere. The World Health Organization has made important strides in the direction of addressing the epidemic of loneliness, setting up a global Commission on Social Connection to address this serious issue. Maybe what we need is local chapters of this commission in all of our cities to implement key measures on the ground. At the very least, we need to recognize that social life is a matter of public health and deserves to be treated as such. Public places like sidewalks constitute the infrastructure that supports it.

If it is not possible or feasible to set up an official organization focused on facilitating social life, then the responsibility of nurturing it needs to be delegated to the people. We in the Placemaking movement have been focusing on the issue of community-led governance over the last 50 years because we recognize that communities are the most capable in revitalizing public spaces. This is why, when sidewalk life suddenly became incredibly important during Covid, we got the amazing dining sheds and social hubs that we see in New York today – through community engagement, improvisation and Placemaking.

Now that we are out of the darkness of lockdown, why must we throw the baby out with the bathwater? Covid opened us up to new way of doing things and we liked those ways. Instead of regressing to old patterns, we should evolve with what we've learned and build on it. Only in this way can our future be an improvement on our past.

Making it Happen

The Main Obstacle - Car and Bike Culture

Car/bike culture has infiltrated deep into our society and still influences almost everything in the design of every city, from the width and number of car/bike lanes to the size of corners to how much valuable public space we sacrifice for parking. This "vehicle" culture has become a kind of giant Ponzi scheme where more car infrastructure is needed to support the existing car infrastructure in a never-ending cycle where communities lose on all fronts.

Community-Led Governance

The community has proven they are more than capable of creating great places when they are given the freedom and support to do so. When regulations on outdoor dining in NYC were relaxed, sidewalks and streets flourished. Local business owners know better than anyone what would serve their customers and their objectives best. They have the most skin in the game and the most understanding of their context. It makes sense, then, to develop a system where we empower local business owners and community members to take up the task of shaping the public space, rather than taking it out of their control and putting it in the hands of committees and institutions that have no real connection to it.

When communities are given the power to create and maintain their surroundings, they even protect them better than outside actors can do. By sitting in the public realm and passively observing their beloved neighborhoods, community members put "eyes on the street" which make excess police monitoring unnecessary. Communities can self-create and self-manage, if given the opportunities and resources, and if empowered and encouraged to do so.

Possible Campaigns

We need to find ways to create and maintain the streets we love...trading in the streets that top-down mandates and the transportation industry have imposed on us over the last 100 years for streets we can enjoy, connect and can thrive in. The core focus areas for this transformation should be:

1) Focusing on nurturing sidewalk life

2) Transforming "killer intersections" into "corners that connect"

3) Creating social hubs

Paris has gone through an incredible transformation over the past few years, largely facilitated by their efforts to empower local leadership and members of the community to improve public places. Their journey can inspire New York's.

Paris is the model for communities in the future

1) Focus on sidewalk life

Currently, our streets are dominated by cars. Over the past 70 years, the transportation industry has been given practically free reign to shape streets in whatever way works best for traffic throughput with everything else demoted to a secondary consideration.

However, streets are the channels for social and commercial life. If they don't provide an environment where social life and business activity can thrive, they don't fulfill their essential purpose in our society. To fix this, we need to turn our focus from the streets to the sidewalks and sidewalk life (as well as sidewalk extensions such as dining sheds).

2) Transform "killer intersections" to "corners that connect"

Just as our streets are dominated by cars, so are our intersections. They have become so large and hostile that they're not only dangerous for pedestrians but also kill all the activity on the corners as people feel unsafe and uncomfortable lingering there. Because of this, we call them "killer intersections." However, corners are anchors in our communities – they are the places where we stop to cross the street, lingering together, and where our paths intersect with those of others. They are important components of our urban fabric and we need to take them back as places for people.

By expanding corners and giving the businesses there the power to shape them through inside out design, we can create environments that are welcoming to foot traffic, patrons, and outside dining. This would impact driver behavior as well since wider and more active sidewalks and intersections have a traffic calming effect.

Streets are channels that move us along and corners are important stops on the way. But the places we end up at are the destinations. A thriving city needs not only vibrant channels via its sidewalk life but also treasured destinations that people love to visit and that can hold a near sacred place in the neighborhood and community life.

This can be achieved by the development of social hubs through the addition of amenities and assets to sidewalks, inside-out design, and vibrant public places like squares and parks.

We need to redefine and reorganize agencies around the outcomes we want to see. With regard to the built environment, this means creating shared places that attract people and support social and commercial life. The best way we can support these outcomes is by transforming underutilized and underperforming public areas – sidewalks, corners, squares, markets, etc. – into dynamic settings for local commerce, social life, and community connection. We can do this by:

Encouraging improvisation and reciprocal gestures by community members and business owners to create sacred, locally designed, unique social hubs
Creating vibrant and interesting sidewalks that support all manner of social and commercial activity
Creating kits of amenities that everyone can use to revitalize their places, especially locally created ones (ex: Street Lab)

What should the new role of NYCDOT be?

With a paradigm shift from car lanes to sidewalks, from traffic throughput to social life, the role of the NYCDOT should also change. We recognize that they're trying to expand their priorities to include bettering sidewalks. In that case, they need to make fundamental changes not only to sidewalks but to streets, because the two go hand in hand. Instead of trying to maximize vehicle throughput, the DOT should work on:

Lane narrowing and sidewalk expansions
Removal of unnecessary turn lanes
Creating safe intersections by expanding and activating corners

Place Management – Six Campaigns for Neighborhood Renewal

Along with better managing the relationship between streets and sidewalks, cars and pedestrians, there also needs to be an intentional shaping of sidewalks with a focus on maximizing social and commercial activity. Some ways to do so are the following:

Create double-loaded sidewalks
Emply inside out design
Create wide sidewalks that support promenading and social activity
Add amenities that include seating, shade structures, kiosks, etc.
Create a business incubator zone or temporary displays to stimulate commercial activity
Organize frequent programming at different times of day to support different user groups

The way for governments to truly help revive community, social, and economic life in neighborhoods is by taking a step back and letting communities take the lead. Locals know their neighborhoods best and are most invested in what happens on their streets. By supporting communities through the provision of resources and guidance when needed without the insistence of controlling and micro-managing every aspect of street life, governments can help revitalize urban life in a more natural and effective way than they have been doing up to now.

The mission of the Social Life Project is to incite a renaissance of community connection in public spaces around the globe. Through our online publication, presentations, campaigns, and catalytic projects, we can create transformative impact on communities everywhere. Our work grows out of more than 50 years devoted to building the global placemaking movement. It is an initiative of the Placemaking Fund, along with PlacemakingX — a global network of leaders who together accelerate placemaking as a way to create healthy, inclusive, and beloved communities.If you are interested in collaborating (articles, presentations, exhibits, projects, and more) or supporting the cause contact us.