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The Design Trust for Public Space’s ‘Water: Designing an Equitable Water Future for NYC’ RFP invited New Yorkers to submit new public space project ideas, aiming to incubate solutions to the pressures exerted on New York by too much or too little water, and connecting New Yorkers with the cultural vibrancy and memory inherent in our waterways. We selected five projects to participate in a funded and guided 2026 incubator, developing their ideas into tangible public realm solutions and resources. This series documents how the Water cohort's projects are taking shape.
Read the first installation here.
On the heels of Climate Week in NYC, we convened our Water Project Incubator to further develop their ideas for the five boroughs' water and public space, aimed at designing a more equitable future. Each project is working towards a big idea that can change a system, whether through permitting, civic design, storytelling, programs, or coalition-building.
This second workshop asked the Water Cohort projects to pitch early ideas for what their final deliverable will accomplish and identify what barriers—technical, resource, and knowledge—might still need to be further explored. We gathered advisors, city agencies, and experts from across sectors to provide deeper guidance on how to overcome these obstacles, make New York City more environmentally just, and scale up to inspire other cities. Here’s a snapshot of those conversations and how the work is developing:
Tiffany Baker of the Dear Neighbor Project combines education curriculum and storytelling to confront the impact of flooding on NYC
Tiffany Baker’s Dear Neighbor Project leveraged public art to increase awareness of flooding in Gowanus and archive neighborhood narratives. With the "NYC Flood Memory Toolkit,” she aims to help students across New York City become their own oral historians while mapping flood data and collecting audio stories. The NYC Flood Memory Toolkit has created a model at The Math & Science Exploratory School (M.S. 447) with a six-week curriculum for middle school students to learn how to document testimonies from their community and the impact flooding is having on their neighborhoods.
During the workshop, the cohort brainstormed what a final platform for this work could look like, how to scale the resource beyond classrooms to cultural institutions and community hubs in public spaces, and ways the data could inform how the city adapts to increased heavy rain and flooding.
Gita Nandan & Zehra Kuz imagine a new inter-tidal zone and creation of floating structures to live on rising seas.
Gita Nandan & Zehra Kuz of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture and Thread Collective are responding to rising sea levels with “On the Water,” a movement to facilitate, advocate, innovate, and construct floating structures, as an ecological, social and spatial response to climate change. On the Water is working to research and define a new intertidal zone, where the ocean meets the land between high and low tides, as a metric to preserve New York City’s waterfront communities and begin to normalize plans for resilient floating buildings as housing and neighborhood infrastructure.
The cohort discussed ideas for different floating typologies and first steps toward navigating the complex local and national permitting hurdles ahead. The project is also looking beyond New York City lines to a “sixth borough,” imagining how this work impacts the neighboring waterfront communities of New Jersey, as “water knows no boundaries,” and a collaborative regional approach across state and city lines holds the most transformative power.
The team sees the floating structures as one response in a suite of imaginative tools needed to address life with climate change, asking, “How is our project a trigger for other projects?” The group discussed ways to “sell” this vision that looks as far ahead into the future as 2100, referencing a similar public persuasion that encouraged Americans to leave urban centers for the suburbs. In the nearer future, the project aims to imagine and plant the seeds for city planning strategies that incorporate floating communities, looking to Jamaica Bay as a case study.
Annabel Finkel of Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners examines how to make viable public drinking water an integral part of NYC streetscapes.
Annabel Finkel, Urban Planner at Starr Whitehouse, knows New York City already has ample, clean drinking water, home to one of the world’s largest municipal water systems. As extreme heat is changing how residents move through the city, she imagines through "Drinking Water in the Public Realm" streetscapes that more prominently and accessibly center public fountains as widespread fixtures. During the workshop, Annabel shared a history of NYC’s drinking fountains and where the water comes from. A through line between all of the day’s discussions reveals how, despite many communities originating in the five boroughs from the water, over time, New Yorkers have become more disconnected from our water sources and waterways, physically and emotionally.
Similar to Trust for Public Land’s 10-Minute Walk campaign that calls for everyone who lives in U.S. cities to have access to a quality park within a 10-minute walk, the group discussed potential messaging and metrics that could be used to easily digest the need and urgency of the problem, and inform widespread water education.
During the session, New York City Council held a hearing on a new local law that would require city agencies to start a “mobile drinking fountain program,” mandating two fountains per council district in the warm weather seasons. This inspired ideas on how to incorporate drinking water infrastructure into future policy plans and design guidelines aimed at addressing extreme heat and mitigation of climate change. The project is thinking through potential strategies for prototyping and implementing well-designed fountains that need less staffing and maintenance than current models, aiming to establish a replicable framework for expanding public drinking water access across NYC over time.
Marine project professional Greg Pucillo maps a path for expanding seaweed aquaculture
Greg Pucillo works at the intersection of built and natural systems. In his Substack newsletter about Algae, The Blob, he describes himself as “someone who is disproportionately excited about seaweed and permitting.” "The Seaweed Zone" aims to make it easier for New Yorkers to explore, propose, and obtain permits for community-scale seaweed aquaculture. Seaweed could help clean polluted waterways and offer sustainable building materials, but Greg sees the lack of access to seaweed farming as a deeper permitting and regulatory problem across New York City’s waters, wanting more people to be able to get in the water and grow things.
The project has prototyped a website resource that maps where and how people can obtain permits to grow seaweed, including data on the environmental conditions and feasibility of each location. This pathway could be used to promote living shorelines more holistically and expand access to other kinds of marine engagement, like oyster and mussel restoration. The group discussed how to get New Yorkers excited about seaweed and to tell a deeper story about an overlooked component of our water ecology.
Kaitlin Krause of Rising Tide Effect creates a Water Literacy Playbook to improve water safety knowledge across the five boroughs
Kaitlin Krause, Founder and Executive Director of the Rising Tide Effect has dedicated her life to teaching New Yorkers about water safety and swimming. She wants to embed water knowledge into our daily lives and infrastructure. Recent data shows that around 1 in 4 New York City children do not know how to swim. As sea levels rise, streets flood more often, and public beaches and pools face continued lifeguard shortages, our water risk is only increasing with too few public awareness campaigns to match the urgency.
Would you know what to do if your subway station started rapidly flooding from heavy rain? "WaterWise NYC" imagines moving beyond a standard reactive emergency response to establishing a system of water safety education where people already are.
Upgraded and clearer signage at the waterfronts, wayfinding, raised subway platforms, environmental markers, public art, and climate-responsive interventions are all strategies discussed to create a comprehensive “Water Literacy Playbook” for the city to implement. Currently the project is researching how New Yorkers encounter water information and mapping opportunities across transit, streets, neighborhoods, and waterfronts, asking, “how can New York City itself become a tool for understanding and connecting to water?” The cohort discussed essential city agency partners and Mayor’s Office priorities to target, as well as barriers to widespread implementation. Kaitlin doesn't want New Yorkers to fear the water all around them, but rather, reconnect and understand the resource that connects us all.
The Water Cohort will continue field work, community engagement, and project development this fall, learning up to a final project incubator workshop in December focusing on storytelling and communications, and refining project solutions towards an intended audience and documenting impacts.
Building off of our Water work, the Design Trust recently announced a new project, Raincheck, to help prepare New York City for extreme rain and flooding with community engagement and equitable urban planning strategies that ensure environmental justice for all of NYC’s neighborhoods. In collaboration with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, HKS, and the CUNY Macaulay Honors College, Raincheck seeks to research and propose design strategies for heavy rain that ensure cross-agency coordination and environmental justice for all New Yorkers.
To disseminate learnings and present the final Water project outputs, Design Trust is planning to host a citywide conference in spring 2027. The Water Convening will gather urban planners and designers, city agencies and local leaders, neighborhood advocates and community organizers, and climate experts and artists to celebrate the five boroughs as a city of water and envision new approaches to city-making. Subscribe for our newsletter to get notified when the venue is announced and event registration goes live.
The Water RFP is generously sponsored by the Woodner Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, HKS, Arup, Amalgamated Bank, and Buro Happold.