Sitting amongst traffic (cars, trash vans, and tractor trailers) and below the omni present subway is NOT a peaceful respite, nor is it enjoyable. My favorite part of the park (just like any other NYC park) is when a rat challenges me for my lunch or shoe. What a waste of money.

There are plenty of neighborhoods in the city that have low civic involvement for a number of reasons: transient population, language barriers, low populations of senior citizens, high populations of ex-cons who may not want anything more to do with the government, lots of people working long hours, etc. The community organizations may be too busy with other projects like fighting pollution or waste transfer stations. Or they may not have much money to contribute to the upkeep of the park.

In my mind, none of these factors make a community any less deserving of a park than the communities that can afford to contribute time and money. That’s what I’m concerned about. If I misunderstood Andy’s use of the word “key,” then that’s all right.

I harp on this all the time on Streetsblog, but until we find a way to elect people who refuse to condone huge giveaways of public money (a la the Vanderbilt Railyards to Bruce Ratner for less than half the MTA’s appraised value, and the huge subsidies earmarked for Ratner’s basketball arena, etc., etc.), I’m afraid we have no choice but to rely on private-sector participation. Which may, perversely, perpetuate this cycle.

Whatever the broader implications of these sorts of public-private partnerships, it seems like the work that the BID is doing here in DUMBO is really helping to make the plaza feel like an organic part of the neighborhood rather than just a generic city project run by some big bureaucracy.

To me, the beautiful (and probably very expensive) one-of-a-kind driftwood bench created by a local artist kind of says it all. That’s not a Parks Dept. bench. That’s a DUMBO bench. I don’t think you get that bench without the public-private partnership between the City and the BID.

For “The Wiz” the 59th Street bridge was paved with yellow linoleum for the “Yellow Brick Road”, and block-long streets were covered with dirt and period props when “Rag Time” was filmed on East 11th Street.

Wonder if these skills can be leveraged for rapid, broad, more permanent implementation in concert with art directors, landscape architects, local community and or BID oversight.

A cookie cutter approach to designing managing and programming these plazas will simply fail and these plazas will not get they kind of positive use adn appreciation necessay to get the city to sustain their efforts and move further in this direction.

Finding strong local partners allows the public plaza program to:

1. Draw on the public space management capacity of BIDs (which are quazi government) and other community-based organizations as well as the Parks Dept, and DOT.

2. Develop and grow broad community based partnerships — Finding the community leaders, building community and city capacity to actually create and evolve the spaces to reflect and celebrate the communities they serve.

3. Design for flexibility – short term experiments, ongoing evaluation, long term visioning.

4. Attract more creative and diverse funding sources to support a broader sense of ownership and inclusiveness I the community – setting up management and funding entities for ongoing management, programming and improvements etc.

5. Be compatible with an upfront and ongoing public process to develop the vision, demand and capacity to grow these spaces in partnership with the city.

These are all thing that the city will not be able to, and should not do alone. For the success of these projects, responsibility needs to be given locally.

A more “mature” public space, with more acreage, trees, facilities, etc. is a park, and in that case the city does indeed do most (though not all) of the maintenance and management. But even there, the lesson from NY and other cities around the country is that a private partner (even just a volunteer friends group) can help the best-funded park be better with more local involvement.

You get what you pay for.

I’m prepared to pay higher taxes for higher quality public services. (I’m also at the low end of the income ladder.)

But the issue is actually more complicated. Outsourcing services turns out not to always save money. In-house architects at the Port Authority have often persuasively shown how the PA ends up spending more by outsourcing design work instead of drawing on institutional expertise.

Outsourcing in Iraq is another example. Shoddy work by contractors ends up getting covered by the Army Corps of Engineers, and US taxpayers get billed twice.

There are times outsourcing makes sense. But essential public goods, such as green space in a major metropolis like New York, is a responsibility solidly belonging to the public sector.

With all that said, like post #1 says, the DUMBO plaza project is a step forward in green street design and the DOT should be given the credit it’s due.

A consequence of the non-profit industrial complex replacing traditional public sector responsibilities (a tenant of neoliberalism, as post 3 points out — in fact, the ideological movement is called “New Public Management”) is that services are redirected to wealthier areas and away from distressed districts unable to privately fund neighborhood services.

The result is greater inequity; neighborhoods most in need of new parks and added greenery, for example, won’t get them — and what does exist in such areas will deteriorate over time.