A Department of Care for New York City
Justin Garrett Moore, AICP, NOMA
I shared the following remarks regarding my proposal for the next administration to create a Department of Care at the Center for an Urban Future’s RE:NEW YORK CITY event on September 22, 2021 at the Stavros Niarchos Library in Manhattan.
“Create a Department of Care to strengthen local capacity to reimagine, maintain, and care for public spaces.”
Good morning. My name is Justin Garrett Moore. I’m an urban designer and planner, and I lead the Humanities in Place program at the Mellon Foundation.
Throughout my career in planning, design, and public service, I’ve worked to create and cultivate inclusive, collaborative, and transformative public spaces. With the city still reeling from the social and economic damage of the pandemic and galvanized by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the need for more equitable and just public spaces is greater than ever.
But in addition to underscoring the power of public space to help sustain New Yorkers through enormous challenges, the past 18 months have revealed something more: the inherent weaknesses in our city’s systems and infrastructure to reimagine, maintain, and care for our public realm.
To help New York recover equitably from the pandemic, city leaders will need to rethink and reinvest in public space to meet the needs of neighborhoods across the city. In order to build trust in this process and ensure inclusive and equitable outcomes, the city will need a better mechanism to facilitate conversations about how any changes to communities will designed, implemented, and sustained.
One solution is to create a Department of Care. Working across government agencies and with community-based organizations and local leaders, this entity would be charged with building local capacity to address ongoing maintenance and care needs for public spaces.
The Department of Care would enable New York City to go beyond the BID and conservancy system and build out citywide yet community-level infrastructure of maintenance and care for the spaces we use every day.
The Department of Care should be designed to break through bureaucratic silos. Caring for public space will require multiple agencies to invest time and resources, and to work collaboratively with local stakeholders who know their communities best. This means having everyone at the table: from the Departments of Transportation, Sanitation, and Health to the Parks Department and the city’s Economic Development Corporation to Small Business Services and Cultural Affairs.
By partnering with local organizations, artists, youth groups, business owners, civic leaders, senior centers, and street vendors, the Department of Care would help facilitate a much deeper understanding of how communities use their spaces—and to develop ambitious ideas for rethinking the public realm to best respond to community needs.
Crucially, the Department of Care would also be tasked with supporting the ongoing maintenance and care of public spaces—including resourcing the work of trusted local leaders already burdened with caring for public spaces—often without any government or institutional support.
Despite the many painful challenges of our times, it is heartening to see the many ways that New Yorkers have embraced and reimagined our public realm. By creating a Department of Care, the city’s next leaders can help ensure that the transformations we’ve experienced are not a temporary phenomenon, but rather signal a new beginning.
Thank you.
