Urban Design as Social Infrastructure

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor treated New York’s physical city not as backdrop, but as protagonist. Mamdani met (and, as mayor, has continued meeting) New Yorkers where daily life actually unfolds — on sidewalks, buses, subways, beaches and street corners — underscoring a simple truth: The physical city is where government shows up most tangibly in people’s lives. 

Streets, parks, plazas, housing, transit, libraries, waterfronts and public buildings form the connective tissue of civic life. When these places are well designed, well maintained and well programmed, they function as social infrastructure, enabling relationships to form, civic trust to grow and communities to thrive. Investing in social infrastructure is therefore not just an urban design strategy — it is a way to make policy visible and effective on every block, every day.

Today, investment and upkeep in this essential social infrastructure are fragmented and often depend on private fundraising or volunteer labor, leaving too many neighborhoods behind. This patchwork model undermines fairness — and makes it difficult to deliver improvements at the scale New Yorkers need. To deliver on Mamdani’s promise of a fairer, more affordable city, the administration should create a social infrastructure plan to coordinate capital investment, maintenance and stewardship across agencies and communities

In his early days as mayor, Mamdani has given every indication that he understands the importance of investing in the physical city to make the city a more livable place where people can connect and thrive. The appointment of Mike Flynn, the co-author of New York’s first Street Design Manual, to run the Department of Transportation is one of multiple steps in the right direction. Now, strong appointments and symbolic gestures must be matched with good policy. Making a citywide social infrastructure plan an early governing priority will serve as a practical blueprint for guiding investments in the physical city and the people who steward it. In practice, it’s a framework to guide what gets created, where, and who maintains and programs these spaces over time.

Public space as essential social infrastructure

Mamdani understands that public spaces are not simply nice-to-have amenities; they are platforms for building civic trust, creating resilient neighborhoods and connecting New Yorkers to social and economic opportunity. His recent commitment to complete the redesign on McGuinness Boulevard, a safe streets project stalled by the Adams administration, is evidence of this. Beyond safety, well-designed public spaces can lower the cost of living by providing free or low-cost places to gather, rest, play, learn, meet neighbors and access services.

Research consistently shows that access to quality public spaces strengthens social cohesion and trust in government. A 2017 Center for Active Design report found that residents without access to quality parks report lower levels of connection and trust in government. The same can be said of libraries, rec centers and other well-designed buildings and civic spaces maintained with pride. 

Features as simple as seating, greenery, shade and interactive programming can significantly increase social interaction and a sense of belonging, as Gehl (my urban design firm) found in “Rx for Social Connection” research with The Bentway and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Public spaces also play a critical role in safety, broadly defined. Environmental design features in urban spaces, such as greening vacant lots or improving street lighting, has been associated with crime reduction. New York City’s Active Design Guidelines correctly suggest that public spaces are vital to supporting public health. And new research from the Shared Mobility Center connects social infrastructure to climate resilience. 

All of these positive outcomes come from treating public space not as a nice amenity but as essential social infrastructure, something the government must intentionally design, fund and sustain.

From fragmentation to coordination 

New York has a long history of investing in the physical city, but these efforts have too often been fragmented, under-resourced and inequitable. 

Park maintenance relies heavily on private fundraising. Without it, parks, especially in the outer boroughs, often don’t meet the Department of Parks and Recreation’s own standards for cleanliness, safety and accessibility. Many plazas and streetscapes depend on Business Improvement Districts for upkeep; open streets and school streets depend on volunteer labor, complex permitting and costly insurance.

This patchwork model undermines scale and fairness. It also contrasts with Mamdani’s commitment to relentless competence — a government that delivers faster, fairer and more visible results. 

While the city urgently needs more affordable housing, housing alone does not create thriving neighborhoods. Mamdani seems to understand this; he has spoken of parks as among the few spaces that are “truly accessible and affordable to each and every person who calls the city home,” saying the goal of public spaces is to ensure that a “dignified life is available to each and every New Yorker.” 

Residents badly need safe routes to schools, green space, convenient and dignified bus stops, libraries, plazas and non-commercial “third spaces” where people can simply be. Social infrastructure must be planned with housing, not added later if and when funding allows.

A social infrastructure plan would mark an important shift for New York, serving as a practical implementation guide for programs from school streets to bus stops and helping to operationalize a people-first approach to governance that requires multi-agency involvement.

Such a framework would move New York from patching together one-off wins to a reliable citywide system built on neighborhood planning models already put in place by the Department of City Planning. It would focus on five things:

• assessing social and physical needs and assets in neighborhoods together
• identifying priority neighborhoods where investment can deliver the greatest benefit
• aligning public realm improvements with planned capital projects and service delivery
• setting measurable outcomes related to affordability, safety, health and connection; and
• establishing sustainable models for stewardship, programming and funding in partnership with community organizations and leaders

Because social infrastructure functions as a network, no single agency can deliver it alone. Effective implementation requires a networked governance model, with clear accountability for coordination across agencies such as the Departments of Transportation, Parks and Recreation, Design and Construction, Housing and Preservation, Sanitation and even the new Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement. This could mean strengthening the role of Chief Public Realm Officer created by Mayor Adams, perhaps creating a deputy mayor of operations for the public realm, as a coalition of public realm advocates is calling for — or establishing a dedicated social infrastructure officer with a mandate to oversee the system, identify priorities and drive implementation.

New York already has strong local precedents for how city agencies and community partners can work together to develop social infrastructure. At Paseo Park in Jackson Heights, what began as an Open Streets pilot during the pandemic has become a permanent, multi-block civic asset supporting thousands of public school students and local residents alike. The new street furniture designed to slow vehicular traffic at intersections was designed and installed in close collaboration with the local community. 

The city’s pedestrian plaza program is another example. By providing a clear application process and design toolkit, neighborhood organizations can apply to create their own plazas. The Public Space Equity program is a tool to ensure neighborhoods with fewer financial resources can maintain these spaces as well. 

Scaling these efforts requires reducing red tape, standardizing permitting and insurance pathways, and making it easier for local organizations to occupy and activate public space. A people-first city invests not only in physical improvements, but in the systems that allow communities to use and care for them over time. 

Sweat the small stuff

As he presses ahead, Mamdani should be mindful of the fact that investing in connection often means making straightforward, human-scale improvements: securing safe places for children to play, shaded seating at bus stops that double as platforms for community information, lighting that enhances safety without floodlighting neighborhoods and greenery that supports both mental health and climate resilience. On a recent Brian Lehrer episode about “sewer socialism,” the New Yorkers who called in made clear they were not asking for the moon — just basic quality urban design and upkeep: evenly paved sidewalks, painted crosswalks, street trees. 

This is not an argument against major citywide infrastructure projects. New York needs those too, from new pedestrian and bike bridges, as Sam Schwartz has recommended, to the redesign of Penn Station. Jens Kramer, the former four-term mayor of Copenhagen who was largely responsible for its transformation into one of the most livable cities in the world, has said that mayors have to identify how investments in citywide spaces are balanced with those in neighborhoods. The challenge is ensuring that flagship investments are matched by neighborhood-scale improvements that people experience every day.

By heeding this wisdom, and by treating social infrastructure as essential civic infrastructure, Mayor Mamdani can position New York as a global leader in people-centered urban policy — strengthening the physical city as the backbone of health, connection and democracy itself.