Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety
Participatory design for the built environment in 15 public housing sites in New York City.
Freelance strategic designer for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in partnership with the Center for Justice Innovation.
Can public housing residents redesign their own environment?
The early days of NSTAT and MAP were all about communicating with the public to gain trust and learn about the existing momentum across 15 sites each with their own needs and pain points.
Community organizers brought people to the table, but more was needed to offer substantive exchanges that resulted in actionable insights.
Organized by a team at the Center for Justice Innovation which had a track record in public innovation, we built the communication materials, designed library of assets that would enable data collection about the sites, and delivered workshops to prime a design informed approach to transforming public space.
Will public participation in redesigning the built environment move the needle on chronic public safety issues?
We were met with an abundance of clear articulations of problems and universal fatigue from past attempts to advocate for change. However, the prospect of adding design to the process was met with a refreshed interest in making change to the experience of living in public housing.
Though we prototyped a bespoke process of bottom up placemaking, the city ultimately chose to go with a turnkey solution that offered a limited menu of specific changes to public space. What was lost in making this choice is a bottom up process that worked beyond a set menu. The package is called CPTED, and is based on theories of public safety that privileges surveillance over engagement and community.
This hotly debated topic is an excellent example of simple + fast vs. nuanced + slow, and how changes in executive leadership have downstream impacts on long term strategy.
Ezio Manzini made the proposition that everyone designs in his book “Design When Everybody Designs”. Two of his PhD students run the New York City DESIS Lab, and teach at the MFA program where I trained at Parsons.
These are the foundations I rely on when working with public sector projects.
