596 Acres

596 Acres was founded in 2011 by Paula Z. Segal, an attorney at the Urban Justice Center in New York City (html ). Its original mission was to identify city-owned land that was vacant or abandoned. It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.

But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

The site features a searchable database and map of 899 “acres of opportunity” on 1,337 sites, and 1,186 acres of community projects on 584 sites. The map also includes colored dots showing where people have access and where people are organizing to liberate land. A primary goal of the site is to

Urban Reviewer (html ) catalogs over 150 urban renewal plans for which NYC received federal funding, often demolishing buildings and relocating people. And NYCommons (html ) helps New Yorkers affect government decisions about public land and public buildings in their neighborhoods.

Wherever possible, 596 Acres seeks to permanently transfer public land to the NYC Parks Department, or private land to a community land trust. But sometimes it needs to create a temporary space for a few years until other planned development moves forward.

In each instance, residents must navigate a bureaucratic maze: applying for approval from their Community Board, winning endorsement from local elected officials, and negotiating with whichever agency holds title to the land. Along the way, 596 Acres provides legal advice, technical assistance, and a network for sharing best practices from successful campaigns.

596 Acres mission requires drawing upon situated knowing of neighborhood residents and the need to be creatively adaptive in dealing with city officials and bureaucracies.

Since this work is focused on extracting policy changes from government, 596 Acres does not seem to be a care-honoring endeavor in a direct sense. However, it is committed to strengthening the nested-I in the sense of organizing citizens to petition the city government for change.

596 Acres is not provisioning a good or service in a conventional sense; its policy advocacy, however, can deliver significant benefits to New Yorkers in the form of pubicly usable real estate and green space. As the last speaker in the video above puts it:

By providing clearinghouse services and databases as tools for campaigns, 596 Acres works to rely on distributed structures, direct capital to commons provisioning (re-allocating real estate for use by the general public), and establish discrimination-free infrastructures.