‘Water: Designing an Equitable Water Future for NYC’ invited New Yorkers to submit new 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.

The Design Trust for Public Space opened its 12th Request for Proposals (RFP) cycle in Fall 2025, a citywide call for project ideas that address key public space challenges. The RFP theme “Water: Designing an Equitable Water Future for New York City,” aims to incubate solutions to the pressures exerted on New York by too much or too little water and envision new approaches to city-making, including commitment to innovative green infrastructure, well-planned coastal resilience, access to waterfronts and waterways, and connecting New Yorkers with the cultural vibrancy and memory inherent in our water.

The Water RFP recognizes that the future of the city’s public life depends on shifting our relationship with water in all its various forms–rain, oceans, rivers–and the multiple ways we engage with it–construction, art, play, drinking, sewage.

To do so, the Design Trust invited New Yorkers to turn their ideas for a more equitable water future into actionable solutions. The two-year initiative will develop up to five water project proposals into tangible initiatives, supported by $10,000 in funding and an incubation process guided by the Design Trust and an advisory committee of city agencies, community stakeholders, and design experts.

Meet the 2026 Water RFP Finalists:

• Tiffany Baker of The Dear Neighborhood Project is creating an “NYC Flood Memory Toolkit,” a public-space communication system helping New Yorkers understand citywide flood risks occurring outside traditional mapped flood zones. 
• Kaitlin Krause of Rising Tide Effect is developing a civic design framework, “Water Wise NYC: Designing a Citywide System for Equitable Water Safety,” with place-based interventions to expand water literacy and safety education. 
• Greg Pucillo’s “The Seaweed Zone Project” aims to make it easier for New Yorkers to explore, propose, and obtain permits for community-scale seaweed aquaculture. 
• Gita Nandan & Zehra Kuz of Thread Collective and the Pratt School of Architecture 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.
•  Annabel Finkel of  Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners is producing a plan for expanding access to drinking water in public spaces with “Drinking Water in the Public Realm.”

Learn more about the Water cohort here. Explore 26 ideas for New York City’s water future from our semi-finalist projects here

More on water and public space:

• Follow the Water project incubator's progress on the Public Space Blog starting here.
• Explore water stories from around the five boroughs in our City Currents series.
• Learn more about our work to prepare NYC for extreme rain and flooding with the Raincheck project.