How Zohran Mamdani Can Build a More Civic New York

It was hard to miss the civic spirit spilling out of Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. You could find his canvassers gathering at parks, playgrounds, and plazas; at 5:30 pm on weekdays or noon on weekends; huddled under the awnings of Dunkin’ Donuts or lingering outside independent coffee shops; and in groups as small as pairs and as large as 150. Climbing up into walk-ups and entering apartment buildings, volunteers knocked on doors and engaged voters in conversations about the challenges of their everyday lives, then introduced them to a mayoral candidate who promised to address those challenges.

A simple logic guided Mamdani’s field operation: Political change begins with talking to your neighbors. Volunteers showed up everywhere: at Jummah Prayer, greeting congregants with voter registration forms and fliers; at farmers’ markets in spring and fall; and holding signs along the New York City Marathon route the weekend before the election. Across more than 5,700 canvassing shifts in 243 neighborhoods, volunteers offered residents a proximate face to the movement, built trust with other New Yorkers, and trained new spokespeople for Mamdani’s affordability agenda. More than 100,000 people volunteered on the campaign, knocking 3.1 million doors, making 4.5 million calls, and sending 2.7 million texts.

While the canvasses were the campaign’s most frequent method of direct voter contact, the calendar brimmed with opportunities to participate. The campaign’s scavenger hunt sent nearly 4,000 participants racing across Manhattan to decode clues about New York history, and a fall soccer tournament, dubbed the Cost of Living Classic, drew players from every borough. There were also dozens of smaller events: community document-shredding drives, DIY merch-making nights, and informal socials that brought volunteers together at little cost. Each of these efforts extended the campaign’s core message: that politics isn’t something distant or elite but something built together in the neighborhoods where people already live.

In an era when political engagement is often limited to rallies and Election Days, Mamdani’s campaign revived the idea that politics happens in everyday life. It revealed that the appetite for civic life runs deep. The challenge for the Mamdani administration will be to transform the social energy of a campaign into the civic infrastructure of a city.

Mamdani has deftly articulated how the affordability crisis permeates every aspect of life in New York: The rent is too high; the price of transit keeps climbing as the modes get slower; the cost of groceries leaves people hungry; and childcare expenses make it nearly impossible to raise a family here—even halal prices are going up. These interlocking pressures compound, forcing hardworking New Yorkers to live on the fringes, into debt and poverty, onto the streets, and ultimately out of the city. His proposed remedies—freezing the rent, enacting universal childcare, and making the buses fast and free—spoke to those material needs and existential fears.

The civic toll of the cost-of-living crisis received less attention during the campaign, but it is just as grave. Having a social life requires disposable income. Spending time with friends or finding romance (“the singles tax”) means spending money on drinks, dinner, or entry fees. Public life increasingly takes place in commercial spaces. From transit fares to childcare to the price of entertainment, there’s a cumulative cost to participation that excludes those without means. As a result, both public and social life narrows to the affluent and flexible. Everyone else is priced out—not only from luxury amenities but from community itself.

When the affordability crisis pushes longtime residents out of their homes and limits where people can spend their free time, it pulls neighbors apart. Even the most cohesive societies would strain under such conditions, but ours is hypnotically distracted, our attention captured by screens that draw us away from the real world. The result is an epidemic of loneliness and disengagement.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s authoritarian project threatens the foundations of civil society and the liberties that sustain it. His administration has sanctioned kidnappings of legal residents; imposed diktats on acceptable speech; targeted universities, foundations, and nonprofits; restricted press freedom, censored dissent, and curtailed the right to assemble. These assaults stoke fear and discourage participation in public life. The same forces that make life unaffordable also make genuine democracy feel unreachable.

How should a mayor confront these civic problems? Mayor Eric Adams, arriving in office after the Covid-19 pandemic had forced a reimagining of the city streets, has been notably attuned to public space. He appointed a “public realm czar” and established the Office of the Public Realm to coordinate the city’s scattered approach to streets, parks, sidewalks, and plazas, and to elevate communal space as essential infrastructure for everyday city life. The office released the city’s first Public Realm Plan in 2023, outlining goals such as expanding access to public restrooms and improving timely delivery of new public spaces.

Adams also consolidated several public-facing bureaus under the Office of Civic Engagement, bringing together the Community Affairs Unit, the Public Engagement Unit, NYC Service, and the Civic Engagement Commission. Yet, even as he promoted civic life through public space, his budgets repeatedly targeted the very institutions that sustain it: libraries, arts organizations, and nonprofits. The City Council successfully fought to restore $53 million to cultural organizations in the FY2025 budget after the mayor’s proposed cuts, emblematic of its dynamic with an administration whose rhetoric of engagement often clashed with its budget proposals.

To confront the twin pressures of affordability and authoritarianism, the next mayor must do more than manage the city; he must rebuild its civic life. Mamdani—like mayors across the country—should focus on three fronts: strengthening neighborhood ties, renewing civic infrastructure, and deepening participation.

Neighborhood ties

People are more likely to put down their phones and step into public life when the invitation comes from down the block. As mayor, Mamdani can help by making it easier for neighbors to gather, and in doing so, spur connectedness and interpersonal trust. Each community board should receive dedicated funds earmarked for hyper-local events—block parties, activity fairs, holiday gatherings, or potlucks like the annual long-table dinner in Chelsea.

This funding should be accessible not only to small groups of residents and local nonprofits but also to commercial establishments willing to briefly close to the public and open their space for a community gathering. The funds would offset any lost revenue—for example, helping a restaurant cover the cost of offering its private dining room for a neighborhood potluck.

This idea builds on models already in place. NYC Service’s Love Your Block program provides microgrants for block beautification projects. Community builder and researcher Sam Pressler has championed extending this approach to gatherings of all kinds. He argues that this program should be as straightforward and anti-bureaucratic as possible: “Giving residents micro grants for neighborhood gatherings is really easy to do. When you design for simplicity, create enough structure to give people direction without restriction, and entrust neighbors to creatively gather their neighbors, good things will happen.”

At the municipal level, the mayor should also appoint a New Resident Liaison within the Office of Public Engagement to coordinate efforts to welcome newcomers to the city, connecting them with local guides, community boards, neighborhood resources, and relevant social services. A small, symbolic gesture like this could help turn the city’s constant churn of arrivals into an opportunity for belonging.

Civic infrastructure

Each era of crisis in New York has led to innovation in civic infrastructure. At the turn of the 20th century, the city built public baths to address public health crises and overcrowding and made hygiene accessible to tenement dwellers. In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia created municipal markets like Essex Street Market and La Marqueta to modernize food access and replace unsanitary pushcarts. More recently, Open Streets and outdoor dining accelerated the pedestrianization movement in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today New Yorkers face a scarcity of public space. There are not even spaces to sit down. The conversation around this problem often fixates on open streets and plazas, but what the city also lacks are public, flexible indoor spaces—places to gather, work, meet, and rest without paying for the privilege.

Cities like Philadelphia and Marseille have shown what’s possible. The Bok Building in Philadelphia, a former technical high school, has been repurposed into a hive of studios, offices, shops, and community workspaces. In Marseille, the city turned a disused tobacco factory into La Friche, a vast cultural campus mixing art, recreation, and daily life. These projects prove that civic imagination can thrive within walls, not just between them.

New York City, by contrast, has poured billions of dollars and hours of energy into privatized redevelopments like the Tin Building and Chelsea Market. These are beautifully designed but functionally exclusive, upscale food halls that remain inaccessible to many, even most Manhattanites. We need interior complements to open streets: shared, affordable, public indoor spaces that extend civic life year-round.

That need shows up in daily life. For remote and freelance workers, “working from home” often means working from cafés—at the cost of a $6 coffee or $18 lunch, even in the outer boroughs. Civic groups without permanent homes pay exorbitant rental fees for meeting space. And in winter, New Yorkers of all ages shuffle from one heated room to the next, spending money just to stay warm and have somewhere to go.

Why not repurpose the city’s unused real estate, vacant offices, and empty public facilities into new “palaces for the people”—public, communal spaces for all New Yorkers? Imagine reopening the underused lower level of Essex Market or converting vacant municipal buildings into civic commons where anyone can work, meet, and belong. Libraries already serve some of this purpose, but too often their hours are limited and their spaces aren’t designed for the range of social and creative needs New Yorkers have today.

New York City is fortunate to already have world-class museums, state-of-the-art libraries, and countless nonprofits dedicated to serving all types of New Yorkers. These existing assets must be continually invested in and maintained for longevity. The Office of the Public Realm has already committed to expanding this civic infrastructure by opening more public restrooms, creating more open streets, and building more skateparks, continuing the city’s tradition of using the built environment to widen access to shared life.

Space to play should remain a core priority for both the Office of the Public Realm and the Parks Department. That means adapting public pools so they can serve communities for more than the 10 short weeks of summer, expanding access to one of the few public places where New Yorkers reliably mix across age, race, and income.

It also means thinking strategically about the city’s signature sports: Why not appoint a “basketball czar” to nurture New York’s first sport? Mamdani should tap into his soccer fandom and accelerate the development of soccer fields in neighborhoods that have long waited for them—-especially ahead of the World Cup next year. And, taking a cue from his own campaign campaign, he should have the Parks Department sponsor free public tournaments in soccer, basketball, running, and more.

Participation

The city’s apparatus for citizen participation stretches from century-old community boards to participatory budgeting, but many of the on-ramps for engagement are hard to find or poorly explained. Strengthening the existing programs and developing new ones can weave a patchwork of programs into a more accessible and coherent local democracy.

Participatory budgeting in New York City uses a form of citizens’ assembly, a model for greater democracy that empowers citizens to make informed recommendations or decisions on issues of public concern. Through a program called The People’s Money, the city’s Civic Engagement Commission convenes a randomly selected, demographically representative group of residents in each borough to review ideas submitted by the public and determine which proposals advance to the borough-wide participatory budgeting ballot. New Yorkers aged 11 and up then vote online or at pop-up polling sites across the city, and the highest-scoring projects receive funding.

It’s a quiet experiment in deliberative democracy, and one worth expanding. The Mamdani administration could give borough presidents the mandate and resources to host similar assemblies year-round, focused on questions beyond budgeting: housing, climate resilience, public safety, and neighborhood planning. Imagine citizens deciding the role of AI in public schools or in city services; it would deepen popular legitimacy for any decision that is made. These assemblies would make civic engagement routine rather than exceptional, signaling that Mamdani wants to bring the people into governing as he did during the campaign.

But assemblies aren’t enough. NYC Service, the city’s clearinghouse for volunteer opportunities, could also be reimagined as the civic backbone of the city. Its volunteer portal should evolve into a more user friendly civic directory: a single searchable hub like the Philadelphia citizen-led Join Philly project that not only connects residents to volunteer opportunities but maps community organizations, mutual aid groups, and local associations. A companion “civic census” could catalog the density of civic life by neighborhood, helping policymakers identify where associational life is thin and resources are needed most.

Digital engagement will also demand new thinking. Mamdani and his communications team masterfully turned online attention into political action, using creative digital tools to link his policy agenda with real-world participation. As mayor, Mamdani shouldn’t abandon his direct-to-consumer approach. Instead, city agencies should be encouraged to adopt his conversational-style across every platform, using clear, engaging media to share updates, promote services, and guide New Yorkers through the bureaucracy. This approach makes city government easier to understand and empowers citizens with the information they need to take advantage of services and participate in public life. This will be especially important as the city rolls out universal childcare, builds the Department of Community Safety, and asks residents to step into a more participatory role in shaping their city.

Mamdani could also move beyond one-way broadcast media like Link NYC’s digital billboards and pilot more mutual ways of engagement. New York City could, for example, experiment with a public social network where residents post announcements, discuss local issues, and exchange services. The city government could use the platform to share definitive information about programs and services, and small businesses could use it to advertise to neighbors. A smaller model, Vermont’s the Front Porch Forum, a public benefit corporation, has operated for 20 years and now reaches nearly 90 percent of Vermont households. Vermonters used it to coordinate mutual aid during major flooding in 2011 and grocery deliveries during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Each of these steps would give New Yorkers a greater stake in local democracy, at a time when it is under threat at the federal level. When people show up again and again to shape the city they share, they build skills, trust, and awareness—qualities that strengthen democratic civil society.

Mamdani will arrive in office as the nation lurches toward authoritarianism and the city strains under loneliness and distrust. The federal government will continue to chill speech, weaken the press, scatter assemblies, and use ICE to target immigrant communities. New York City can stand as a counterexample by protecting and expanding the conditions for participation in public life.

Mamdani’s agenda is built for that challenge. Policies like the Department of Community Safety, community-owned grocery stores, and strengthened sanctuary protections aim to make daily life more livable. A coordinated civic program would complement this work by lowering the barriers to participation, reclaiming shared spaces, and rebuilding trust between residents and government.

And the revenue measures that fund these programs, most notably taxing the rich, reinforce the social safety net that keeps people anchored and able to take part in public life. Protecting civic life requires protecting material life; his platform recognizes that the two are inseparable.

At the end of his primary campaign, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, inviting New Yorkers to share the streets with him. As he walked down Broadway, people jumped from their seats, closed their tabs, and stopped their bikes to join him. His campaign was a rehearsal for a different kind of city: joyful, solidaristic, and alive. For a few hours at a time, volunteers stepped out of isolation and into a shared rhythm, rediscovering what it means to belong. That instinct to use politics not only to govern but to gather is precisely what New York needs right now.