Why Civil Society Matters in NYC

Incubating Ideas
“We change minds.” That was how Rossana Ivanova, Vice-President of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), described the role of her New York-based NGO to a visiting delegation from Singapore last month.

I soon learned that the RPA was also willing to wait very patiently — while working very thoroughly — for the minds of those in government to change. Sometimes, it is decades before they see their plans implemented.

The RPA is an NGO that has been producing plans since the 1920s for the tri-state metropolitan area of New York-New Jersey-Connecticut. Its plans are backed by research and public engagement exercises, which are the basis of RPA’s confidence when it advocates publicly — sometimes to the chagrin of officials — for those plans.

One example of this was when RPA argued strongly in its 1996 plan for a new trans-Hudson River tunnel for transit trains linking Newark with New York City, to facilitate the hundreds of thousands of daily commuters between the two cities and further spur growth in the region. After stalling for many years because of high cost and a lack of political will, it was announced in 2016 that the US$23 billion Gateway Project finally secured federal funding. Construction is scheduled to start by 2018 — more than 20 years after RPA’s plan was published.

And yet, New York and New Jersey might have waited even longer if it was not for the research and advocacy work of RPA. I would call this work the incubation of ideas — putting good ideas out in the public sphere; substantiating and defending them with evidence; developing and nurturing those ideas while waiting for them to become mainstream and finally, for the conditions to be right for them to be implemented. For me, this was one of at least two key roles that New York City’s civil society plays.

Sharing the risk and burden of public goods provision
The second role they play is to share the risk and burden of providing public goods. Nowhere is this role clearer than in the story of the High Line.

The High Line is a 2.3km park built on an elevated freight railway line that once carried, among other things, cattle into the meatpacking district of New York City. The rail line fell into disuse in the 1980s, sparking a decades-long debate about what to do with it. In the 1990s, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the authorities wanted to tear it down. But Joshua David and Robert Hammond, two New York residents who met at a community board meeting convened to discuss the tearing down of the line, formed a group called the Friends of the High Line that fought for and eventually won the battle to convert the line into a park.

It helped that Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was sympathetic to the park’s cause. The deal happened also in part because Mayor Bloomberg was able to get Friends of the High Line to do a lot heavy lifting, hence relieving the city government of that work. The logic was: If you really want it so badly, you have to show it by working for it.

Friends of the High Line raised from donors US$44 million out of the US$152 million needed to build the park’s first two sections (which cover most of the park). Today, the civil society group raises 98% of the park’s annual operating budget and is responsible operating the park.

This arrangement not only minimises the financial draw on the city’s coffers, it also reduces the risk for the city government, because if the project had failed for one reason or another, Friends of the High Line would have taken the bigger hit, given its major role. This risk sharing makes it more likely for the city government to go along with the proposal. On top of this, the city continues to own the park, giving it, at least theoretically, veto power and final control over its long-term destiny.

As the impact that civil society has on modern urban life grows in many places, the example of New York City’s brand of civil society — how it is able to make enduring contributions to the city’s landscape — offer other cities much food for thought.

About the Writer

Elgin Toh
Senior Assistant Director
Centre for Liveable Cities

Elgin worked in the National Security Coordination Secretariat, doing research on social resilience and terrorism issues. He was also a reporter at The Straits Times.