By Marco Shalma

I’ve sat in more city-agency conference rooms than I’ve sat in actual restaurants this year, which is sad when you realize food is my religion. And every single meeting starts the same way. Someone clears their throat, glances at their boss, and says the magic sentence: “We’re looking for something innovative.” They stretch the word like taffy, like it means something. Like they’re about to greenlight a project that changes how New Yorkers gather, eat, or even feel the city.

Then you show them something genuinely new. Not a re-skinned version of last year’s program. Not a recycled pilot with slightly different signage. Something with actual pulse. Real people. Real culture. Real risk. Something that would take a dead public space and bring it back to life with bodies, color, and sound. And you watch the whole room freeze. Half the faces stiffen. Someone suddenly becomes fascinated by their laptop. The temperature drops ten degrees. Because “innovative” was never the ask. “Innovative-looking but fully neutered” was.

One agency — and I won’t name them, because they love performative “community impact” too much to survive the ego hit — begged for a new activation model. They said the old programs weren’t working. They said they needed fresh thinking. I bring them a concept that would rewire foot traffic, drive spend to local vendors, and turn the plaza into an actual destination instead of a wind tunnel. First thing out of their mouth? “This feels… bold.”

Bold? That’s the word you opened the meeting with. But that’s the problem. They want the theater of innovation, not the responsibility of innovation. Something that photographs like change but functions like bureaucracy. A concept that has the edges shaved off so nobody has to sign off on anything that could require courage.

This isn’t one agency. This is the whole machinery. The modern municipal ecosystem runs on institutional self-protection. Every proposal gets passed through a chain of people whose job is not to ask, “Will this make New York better?” but, “Will this create a problem I’ll have to answer for?” That’s why we get pilot programs nobody attends, events nobody remembers, and initiatives that die quietly before anyone asks where the money went.

And money isn’t the issue. City spending on public programming has gone up across multiple agencies, including DOT, EDC, Parks, and various BID partnerships. Tens of millions funnel into “public realm improvements.” But if the mentality stays the same, the output stays soft. You can’t fund your way out of fear.

Meanwhile entrepreneurs are out here building things with actual stakes. Trying to create spaces that feel like New York again. Trying to put culture where it belongs: outside, loud, real. And the city greets that energy with rulebooks and reviewers who’ve never built anything except a paper trail.

New York used to reward guts. Now it rewards caution.

You can’t build a great city out of fear.

And right now, fear’s the one running the meetings.

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