Who Cleans the Park?: Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City

by John Krinsky, Maud Simonet

America’s public parks are in a golden age. Hundreds of millions of dollars—both public and private—fund urban jewels like Manhattan’s Central Park. Keeping the polish on landmark parks and in neighborhood playgrounds alike means that the trash must be picked up, benches painted, equipment tested, and leaves raked. Bringing this often-invisible work into view, however, raises profound questions for citizens of cities.

In Who Cleans the Park? John Krinsky and Maud Simonet explain that the work of maintaining parks has intersected with broader trends in welfare reform, civic engagement, criminal justice, and the rise of public-private partnerships. Welfare-to-work trainees, volunteers, unionized city workers (sometimes working outside their official job descriptions), staff of nonprofit park “conservancies,” and people sentenced to community service are just a few of the groups who routinely maintain parks. With public services no longer being provided primarily by public workers, Krinsky and Simonet argue, the nature of public work must be reevaluated. Based on four years of fieldwork in New York City, Who Cleans the Park? looks at the transformation of public parks from the ground up. Beginning with studying changes in the workplace, progressing through the public-private partnerships that help maintain the parks, and culminating in an investigation of a park’s contribution to urban real-estate values, the book unearths a new urban order based on nonprofit partnerships and a rhetoric of responsible citizenship, which at the same time promotes unpaid work, reinforces workers’ domination at the workplace, and increases the value of park-side property. Who Cleans the Park? asks difficult questions about who benefits from public work, ultimately forcing us to think anew about the way we govern ourselves, with implications well beyond the five boroughs.

Genres: Urban Studies

288 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2017

Reviews

[Navid Hasan]

Admittedly DNF but I got within 20 pages. Very informative book, it was interesting to learn the various modes of labor used to clean and maintain NYC parks. Some of these forms of labor are argued to be slavery-adjacent, which I agree with. Learning about the dynamics of volunteer labor and philanthropy in relation to certain nyc parks was very interesting. I wouldn’t suggest this book unless you’re really trying to get in the weeds of park cleanup (no pun intended.)

[Gordon]

This book is an excellent application of theories of labor through the case study of New York City parks; the workers, the work, and the systems in which those things sit. The collaboration between John Krinsky and Maud Simonet is a great balance, as they note, between Krinsky's deep knowledge of NYC and Simonet's expansive knowledge of political/labor theory.
The text reads like someone is talking to you about a topic that they are deeply passionate about. It became hard not to become passionate about the neo-liberalization, workplace structures, and systematic injustices of the parks department.
While answering questions about the nature of work in the parks department Krinsky and Simonet are highlighting broader shifts in the political landscapes of New York City and the US regarding neoliberalism and the transfer of power from the public to private sector. As much as this book specifically talks about the NYC Parks Department I would consider it valuable reading for anyone interested in the evolution of governance in New York City and around the world.
I do not come from a political science or sociology background so I do not quite have the credentials to make criticism of the methodologies or results that Krinsky and Simonet produced, but I do have one complaint formally of the text which prevents a 5-star review. I think that they did a wonderful job explaining the vastly complex web of systems which make up the parks department, but this text is in dire need of more diagrams. The amount of relationships described in this book is immense, and just a few diagrams could greatly improve the readability, especially in the first chapters when so many highly esoteric titles and bodies are being introduced. Other than that, this book was a comprehensive text, and a pleasure to read.

----Spoilers (Kind of)----
The last chapter, the Afterword, was in some ways the most important chapter in the book. After years of fieldwork and preparing this book there was a change in administration to Bill de Blasio. de Blasio, who ran partly on a platform of fixing the parks, fixes some of the problems which are so central to Krinsky and Simonet's thesis. It is quite uplifting to see them take the changes made by de Blasio and in a short 10 pages make you reconsider everything that you have just read. It makes the book finish on a cautiously optimistic note which is exactly what is needed if we are going to make the best out of our public spaces through effective public-minded governance.

[Yoo-Yoo]

Recommend for anyone in the non-profit world that works regularly with their local city government. A series of eye-opening interviews and observations about how volunteers are over-valued and recognized compared to the minimum-wage workers who do the same work daily.

In an ideal world, the parks departments would have all the funding they need, but since that is rarely the case, what low-wage or free labor is regularly used to fill in the gaps, and what further inequities does this system create?

What's the right balance between pushing for more paid employees vs organizing volunteers to do the same work for free? What leads the best long-term outcome? I wish the book had continued the research and provided an answer for nonprofits and cities to follow. But nothing in public works is that simple.