Alliance for Public Space Leadership

What is the “public realm”?

The public realm in the broadest sense encompasses all publicly accessible exterior spaces. Composed of streets, sidewalks, parks, plaza, waterfronts, natural areas, and more, this system of public spaces represent roughly 40 percent of the city’s land mass.

Open space is a more narrowly defined term for publicly accessible parks, playgrounds, waterfronts, and plazas used primarily for leisure, play, or sport, or that is set aside for the protection and enhancement of the natural environment.

What do we stand for?

We envision a public realm strategy that celebrates city life, keeps people safe, builds connections, and promotes mental and physical health. Our vision is intentional about using public space to reinforce the vitality, commerce, and culture of our business and neighborhoods through an innovative and inclusive approach. New Yorkers deserve public spaces designed to meet their needs and serve every community so that one’s access to quality open space is not determined by income, zip code, age, or ability. With collaborative planning, investment, and management, we can increase access to our public spaces, helping to eliminate disparities across neighborhoods.

APSL is focused on creating a new approach to planning, investing, and managing New York’s public spaces. We believe our reforms will result in a better run system of open spaces where city agencies can collaborate to deliver well-maintained, well-designed, and well-loved spaces.

Our Platform

Our updated policy platform centers around five key recommendations:

Recommendation #1: Invest in the Public Realm

This includes funding public spaces like the City funds public infrastructure, allocating a percentage of capital project budgets to maintenance, bolstering the City’s capacity for public realm management and maintenance, employing creative value-capture mechanisms to fund public realm projects, increasing funding for summer streets, and baselining more robust funding in the City budget for NYCParks.

Recommendation #2: Reform the City’s permitting process to enable activation

We can achieve this by developing a more transparent online permitting system, reforming the street vending permitting system, establishing clear and consistent criteria for permit approvals, introduce a sliding scale of liability, allow flexibility by offering rain dates, and creating partner programs to allow for reoccurring and consistent programming.

Recommendation #3: Revise our procurement practices to enable greater innovation

Such as by supporting City agencies exploring alternative delivery tools, expanding the vendor pool, enabling small- and emerging-firms to work on public realm projects with streamlined contracts, prioritizing opportunities for economies of scale, and increasing transparency to ensure meaningful community engagement.

Recommendation #4: Create a Citywide Public Realm Plan

By evaluating current public infrastructure and neighborhood disparities, making a comprehensive plan for the maintenance, activation, and creation of public space, expanding the scope of what is considered public realm by rethinking access and beyond the right-of-way, reimagining our curbs and corners, and bolstering community-centered initiatives.

Recommendation #5: Ensure strong leadership and oversight over the public realm

Through the creation of a Public Realm Advisory Group, with streamlined interagency coordination, and by ensuring that public realm leadership within City Hall is well resourced with dedicated funding and staff, has a key role in the decision-making, and is able to focus on how public realm projects intersect with housing, climate, and infrastructure.

How do we define the public realm?

The public realm in the broadest sense encompasses all publicly accessible exterior spaces. Composed of streets, sidewalks, parks, plaza, waterfronts, natural areas, and more, this system of public spaces represents roughly 40 percent of the city’s land mass. The public realm is our civic commons and is critical to our health and well-being. As a collective, we must begin to think about the public realm as infrastructure in the same way that we think about other urban systems like housing and transit. It is complex and requires big-picture thinking with diversified and multifaceted solutions and support.

Download the 2025 Policy Platform here.

Want to learn more about MAS’ public realm advocacy? Check out our Public Realm Action Plan here.