"Living in the Moment," Interviews with Ya-Ting Liu and Vishaan Chakrabarti, Oculus, Fall 2024.

"I think about prioritizing public space management through what I call hardware, software, and “org-ware.” When it comes to hardware, it’s a lot of this capital stuff we were talking about at the be- ginning. Software gets into all the programming and maintenance work. Is it well maintained? Is it clean? Are interesting things happening in the space? That is critical, because you can build a brand-new plaza, but if it’s filled with trash, no one is going to use it. The software piece is just as important; it is not sexy, and hard to fund, but it is absolutely critical. The city relies on partners to do this work: business improvement districts, friends of parks groups, conservancies, neighborhood groups. But for partners who want to host an open street or do maintenance and programming, we make it very hard for them, so that’s been a real focus of ours. We need these partners—how do we make it easier for them?

And lastly, “org-ware” is more internal. How do you ensure this focus lasts through different administrations? The priority and emphasis always come from the mayor, deputy mayors, and senior levels of the administration. If the senior executive team is not focused on it, you won’t have a lot of juice or resources in your own office. The fact that the deputy mayor for operations has prioritized this has enabled us to do a lot in a short amount of time."