Untaped is a coalition-based project tackling the regulatory barriers that are severely limiting New York organizations’ ability to activate and use public spaces for community programming. Read the Press Release Announcement.
From hosting simple block parties to planning a performance in the park, community organizations and neighbors face an unwieldy maze of permitting and insurance requirements to use their communal spaces freely. In some cases, nearly seven city agencies are required to sign off on the permitting for one event, each with their own complicated processes. In the midst of the city’s ongoing budget crisis resulting in reduced investment in public space management, New Yorkers will depend more and more on the private sector to deliver important resources for our neighborhoods and to fill these gaps.
At this critical moment for the future of NYC’s public space access, Untaped will generate new ideas for policy reform and expanding resources. Led by The Design Trust for Public Space, City Parks Foundation and the Trust for Public Land, and in partnership with community-based organizations in all five boroughs that regularly produce public space programming, including Uptown Grand Central, The Brownsville Community Justice Center, The Point CDC, Queensboro Dance Festival, and Alice Austen House, Untaped is working to slash the bureaucratic red-tape around hosting events and programming in new york city streets, sidewalks, parks, and plazas.
This project, grounded in the learnings and coalitions built as part of Design Trust’s Turnout NYC and Neighborhood Commons initiatives, recognizes the potential of public spaces as vibrant venues for the arts, local culture, education, culinary experiences, and more, seeking to make NYC’s civic commons more open and inclusive.
Untaped seeks to:
Make parks and public space inherently more open and accessible to arts, cultural, culinary, educational, and social organizations, especially in historically marginalized neighborhoods
Unlock private resources for New Yorkers to experience the many benefits of arts, cultural, and related programming in their own neighborhoods, especially during a time of dramatic public contraction.
Leverage the insights driven from this arts-based project to build an advocacy campaign to benefit the other allies looking to use public space productively and proactively.
Doing so will foster an expanded dialogue across city agencies and produce viable and transformative policy change
Funding for Untaped is provided by the NYC Green Fund, administered by City Parks Foundation.
Untaped will award four Design Trust Fellowships in Legal Policy, User Experience, Public Space Management, and Economic Policy. All four fellows will team-up with the Design Trust to tackle long-standing policy problems faced by public space users. Learn more and apply for an Untaped Fellowship here!
Public spaces are vital places where New Yorkers feel connected to their city and each other. Community members deserve clarity and agency in deciding how they can leverage these spaces to benefit their neighborhoods. The Untaped project is a call to action to city leaders to dismantle the status quo and open up public spaces for all.
Untaped will create a socio-economic impact statement about public space activation that establishes the direct social, economic, and community health loss of curtailed public programming and the additional indirect benefits to community that would have accrued based on that programming, as well as test additional value capture metrics that include non-traditional indicators such as health, joy, and or safety.