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A note before we begin: this episode was recorded in November 2025, just after Zohran Mamdani was elected New York's next mayor but before his inauguration on January 1. At the time, it was unclear whether Ya-Ting's role as Chief Public Realm Officer would continue under the new administration. She has since joined NYU Tandon as Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy in the Office of the Dean — a new portfolio she'll no doubt bring the same energy and strategic clarity to.
I first met Ya-Ting Liu in Turin.
We were both speaking at Utopian Hours, the annual international city-making festival. She went on just before me — and I remember sitting in the audience, genuinely amazed, because it’s not every day you hear about a job that, until very recently, didn’t exist. She had just been appointed New York City’s first-ever Chief Public Realm Officer, and she was telling the Turin audience what it means to be, as her son once put it, “in charge of the outside.”
A little over a year later, I found myself sitting across from her inside New York City Hall itself. She calls it a museum she gets to work out of. Walking in, I understood why.
Public space is the secret sauce
Ya-Ting’s role was born out of a very specific moment. It was 2022, post-COVID, and the internet was full of clickbait about the “death of cities.” Remote work was permanent. Nobody wanted dense downtowns anymore. Office vacancies were going to hollow out Manhattan forever.
Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams commissioned the “New” New York Panel — a cross-section of civic and industry leaders tasked with pushing back on that narrative. Out of their recommendations came a line item that surprised a lot of seasoned urbanists: create a director of public realm position within City Hall.
For the first time, Ya-Ting told me, big business, the real estate community, and the commercial districts were all singing the same song. Public space was the secret sauce. It was why workers would come back to offices. It was why tourists would come back to Times Square. It was why a dense city could still feel livable.
Here’s the part I love: when deputy mayors Meera Joshi and Maria Torres-Springer approached Ya-Ting with the opportunity, there was no template. She stared at a blank Word doc and wrote her own job description. Title, press release, portfolio — all of it. How often does that happen inside a bureaucracy the size of New York?
Utility spaghetti
The flagship project of Ya-Ting’s tenure is the redesign of Fifth Avenue — twenty blocks from Bryant Park to Central Park, reimagined as a world-class pedestrian boulevard. The design is done. The vision is clear. Wider sidewalks, planters, tree-lined streets, a green artery connecting two of the city’s great parks.
Construction is scheduled to begin in 2028.
Why the wait? Because of what Ya-Ting’s colleagues call utility spaghetti — the tangled, unmapped, surprise-every-time mess of pipes, cables, vaults, and conduit under any New York street. When I spoke to former NYC Parks Comissioner Adrian Benepe and and staffer, Fiona Watt for my book, THE NATURE OF OUR CITIES, about urban forestry, they described the same problem. So did Daan Grasveld (Urban Jungle Project) when we talked about rooftop trees a few seasons back. You cannot plant a street tree, rebuild a curb, or redesign a boulevard in this city without block-by-block civil engineering to figure out what’s actually down there.
It is one of the most consequential bottlenecks in urban greening worldwide. And it is also — Ya-Ting would not pretend otherwise — a big reason the pace of public realm change can feel glacial, even when the political will is there.
Find the Avengers
One of the things I asked Ya-Ting, because I thought it would resonate with a lot of listeners, was this: how do you keep going when you hear no all the time?
Her answer was one of the most practically useful things I’ve heard on this show.
First, she said, there are people inside government who want to say yes. They just aren’t always empowered, or working in a culture that invites them to raise their hand. A big part of her job has been finding them — what she calls the “public realm Avengers” — in every agency, and building a brain trust from the inside out. Her advice to listeners in other cities: do the reconnaissance. The allies exist. Find them.
Second, she said, the power of advocacy and storytelling is what ultimately moves government. It is grinding, unglamorous, often thankless work. Budget session after budget session. Legislative cycle after legislative cycle. But the advocates who keep showing up are the ones who, eventually, crack things open.
I write in my own book about how every city needs someone — or a small team of someones — whose entire job is to cut across the silos and hold the bigger picture. In New York, for three and a half years, that person was Ya-Ting.
Partners, not policing
Another theme ran through our conversation: New York City cannot maintain and activate all of its public space by itself. It never could.
It relies on partners — from the Central Park Conservancy at one end of the spectrum to a block association hosting a Saturday open street at the other. Ya-Ting’s stance is clear: the city’s orientation toward partners should be thank you. How can we reduce friction? How can we make it easier for you to do this work you’re doing on behalf of the public?
The clearest proof of concept I heard is Paseo Park — formerly the 34th Avenue Open Street — in Jackson Heights, Queens. Twenty-six blocks. Jackson Heights was, in Ya-Ting’s words, the epicenter of the epicenter of the COVID pandemic in New York, disproportionately home to healthcare and service workers, and badly underserved by parks. During the pandemic, the neighborhood claimed the street, first for one day a week, then more, and more. It is now on its way to becoming a permanent linear park touching six public schools.
None of that happened because City Hall drew it up. It happened because a community dared to imagine something different, and the city — eventually — said yes.
One percent is pocket change
The last thing we talked about is the part I keep turning over: how governments communicate value.
There’s a long-running campaign in New York called 1% for Parks — an effort to dedicate 1% of the city’s budget to the parks department. It keeps falling short.
Ya-Ting and I landed in the same place on why. One percent doesn’t feel like much. It sounds like pocket change. It’s the kind of number you round up at a grocery store checkout and then forget about. It doesn’t tell a New Yorker what they will actually get in exchange.
What if, instead, the pitch was: every park in New York will have working bathrooms, working water fountains, clean playgrounds, safe equipment, year-round? That’s a concrete outcome. That’s something a parent can picture. That’s something a government can be held accountable for at the end of a four-year term.
This, I think, is where the urban nature movement globally has the most to learn. We are not short of data or evidence. We are short of outcomes that real people can see, touch, and demand.
Three spaces
I asked Ya-Ting for her three favorite public spaces in New York. If you’re visiting, here they are: Paseo Park in Jackson Heights; the Arches at Gotham Park, nine acres of newly opened public space under the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge; and Doyers Street in Chinatown, a narrow pedestrianized lane lined with outdoor dining. All three are, in different ways, what happens when a city decides to say yes.
Near the end of our conversation, Ya-Ting described her work like this: you wake up, run top speed head-first into a brick wall, and then you get up the next day and do it again. Once in a while, you punch through — and that feeling is a rush. I thought about that a lot on my flight home.
Ya-Ting is no longer Chief Public Realm Officer. As of early 2026, she’s at NYU Tandon as Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy in the Office of the Dean. New portfolio, same sensibility. If there is anything consistent about her career arc — Yosemite park ranger, Peace Corps Nepal, MIT planner, advocate, government insider, now academic strategist — it’s that she follows the places where she can do the most unglamorous, most consequential work, and then does it.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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Sponsor note: The Bernard van Leer Foundation generously supports this season, and I’m honoured to be a Van Leer Fellow — exploring whether urban nature can truly fulfill our evolutionary need for wilderness during the most formative stages of life: pregnancy, early parenthood, and childhood.
