City Planning & Urban Affairs Lecturer: Cities Should Give Public Space Officers Real Power

After protracted periods spent indoors in recent years, it’s little surprise that demand for accessible, aesthetically pleasing public spaces is on the rise. Cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston have even gone so far as to appoint public servants with the specific task of beautifying and renovating open-to-the-public places like parks, streets, and plazas.

Leadership in these kinds of roles demands expertise in areas like development and sustainability within the context of climate change, transportation, infrastructure planning, urban design, environmental law, and green IT—the very topics students explore and come to understand when studying in BU MET’s Master of City Planning and Master of Urban Affairs programs.

In a recent New York Times story spotlighting New York City’s newly appointed chief public realm officer, BU MET City Planning & Urban Affairs Lecturer Philip Barash weighed in on recent efforts by cities to experiment with newly designed public realm roles. Barash, an urban planner who co-founded the Public Sphere Projects, which champions effective and equitable public spaces, says that in order for cities to prioritize giving people the public spaces they deserve, they must do more than create these positions—they must also allocate the resources, confidence, and commitment to empower them to achieve their goals.

In order to enact meaningful change, these officers, Barash explained, should be “at the top of the municipal pile,” and not be a “minor functionary buried in a couple of departments.”