ABSTRACT
Governance of the public realm, including of public parks, has increasingly been delegated to Public Private Partnership (PPP) regimes. This means that private actors and the values they articulate influence how the urban public realm is designed, managed, activated, and programmed. Private policy actors have framed the activation of the public realm as an integral strategy to placemaking and to produce more inclusive cities by fostering new spaces for sociability, cultural activity, and consumption. In New York City, which is the epicenter of these types of parks governance partnerships, public officials have begun to scrutinize and critique how these regime program public parks, especially as it relates to large events. In this chapter, we critically assess this aspect of the broader placemaking ethos: the use of public parks for large events and their transformation into “eventscapes” (Furman 2007; Hou 2010). Through a narrative analysis of public hearings and interview scripts, the chapter examines how government officials, private partners, and parks advocates frame New York City’s the eventization of urban parklands and how these narratives express support for or a critique of the larger parks PPP regime.
