We might think to prohibit these behaviors, whether through signs, fences, or laws. However, in situations where there is no place for the behavior to go, there is another powerful option: redirect it to a designated location.

A few weeks ago, New York City opened its first deliverista hub outside City Hall Park, with more planned. It offers NYC’s roughly 80,000 app-based delivery workers, known as Deliveristas, a 24/7 rest area and recharging station for their phones and ebikes. However, it also serves another purpose: with its amenities, it pulls Deliveristas into one place. If it goes according to plan, this will not only make their lives easier, but clear up sidewalks, reduce battery fires, and allow for more effective outreach.

By examining the logic behind this, we can analyze when and how this kind of intervention works.

When There Is Nowhere Else for Behavior to Go

There is a civic design pattern hiding in plain sight: In situations where a persistent behavior creates public conflict despite efforts to suppress it, managing it spatially benefits those doing the behavior, those upset by it, and those attempting to manage its externalities. When the situation and intervention align, this works remarkably well.

We know this logic from skate parks. Skateboarders, if given nowhere to go but still interested in recreating with their friends, do tricks in family parks creating “public disorder”. Since prohibition doesn’t stop them, and we want them to be able to recreate, we create skate parks with half pipes. Now they have a better place to skate, and the other park users have the quiet family park they wanted.

This highlights an important success criteria: the alternative space has to be genuinely desirable. Creating a skate park with a half pipe produces a space that skaters genuinely want to use, causing all parties to benefit and not requiring enforcement. While some bad faith actors might still use family parks, most will do something that genuinely improves their experience.

Let’s take another example: the dog rest area. Currently dogs in NYC are told many places not to pee without being told a meaningful place to pee.1 The result is the scent of baking urine in the summer and pee soaked tree beds. If we instead provided dogs a place to pee, that they actually used, we could hose it down easily and it would smell less than if the pee was not centralized to begin with.

This illuminates another strength of this logic: Concentration creates a new opportunity to mitigate the negative externalities of the behavior.

When Centralizing Fails

Providing a persistent behavior a place to go has the potential to benefit every party. However, real world circumstances often get in the way. The new location provided might not attract the desired group, or the centralization can work perfectly but be infeasible for external reasons.

We can see this in the occasional disregard for protected bike lanes. Protected bike lanes attempt to pull biking behavior into a safer and more orderly space by providing bikers a place to go. This is also intended to ensure that bikes don’t end up on sidewalks or going the wrong way. However, New Yorkers can attest to the fact that, while most bikers use these lanes, it is still extremely common to see bikers on sidewalks, in the car lanes, or going the wrong way down a bike lane despite a nearby lane being in the right direction. Even when a place is provided to accommodate a behavior, it will not always be used. In these situations, unfortunately enforcement might become necessary.2

Another failure mode can be seen in season 3 of “The Wire”. Major “Bunny” Colvin is a Baltimore district commander pressured to lower his crime numbers. He can’t arrest his way out of the drug trade. So, he finds a cluster of abandoned blocks at the edge of his district and tells dealers they won’t be arrested there. As the buyers follow, they leave the residential streets clear. Public health researchers show up and start running needle exchanges, blood testing, and condom distribution. By its own operational logic the experiment was successful, but once City Hall discovers the experiment, it collapses under political and institutional pressure.

Centralization is not always morally or politically neutral. As behaviors become more harmful, contentious, or stigmatized, the ethics of concentrating, rather than suppressing, them become significantly more complicated. As we can see, even when the logic accomplishes its goal, it can fail for other reasons.

Another reason centralizing might fail can be seen in the example of the Deliversita hub: In a moment when immigrants are rightfully wary, the largely immigrant Deliversita population might not want to be concentrated. Even when the perks are there, there can be unrelated risks of concentration.

A Design Question

Cities will continue to face behaviors that persist despite deterrence. It is essential to understand why, when, and how we should accommodate them. While we shouldn’t accommodate every persistent behavior, we should stop reaching for prohibition before asking where the behavior could go instead.

More times than we give it credit for, the question is not whether behavior exists, but whether cities shape where it happens.

As we get ready to leave the basketball court, I hesitate. Black plastic bags and empty Arizona bottles are scattered along the edge of the court. Should I just walk around and pick them up quickly? After all, the trash can is right there, but there are a lot of people around. I decide not to.

We often frame the problem of clean public space as one of litterers behaving badly. That framing pushes us toward solutions aimed at stopping bad behavior. But there is another way to look at it: what if the real opportunity lies with people who might be willing to pick trash up when they notice it? Even if only a small number of people acted on that impulse, many spaces could quickly become cleaner.

I believe this is a problem of social permission. Social permission is not what society formally allows, but the unwritten structures that inform what behavior we think is acceptable. So how do we create social permission? Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just come from the ideas in our head, but also from the physical environment helping us act in new ways. What if instead of trying to persuade people, we changed which actions were visible and easy?

The Solution: Visible Civic Affordances

Visible Civic Affordances

Small tools or features in public space that make pro-social behavior easy, visible, and socially legitimate, helping new norms emerge.

I just used a big word: Affordances. Affordances are just the characteristics of an object that suggest how it can be used. A door handle invites pulling. A bench invites sitting. A trash grabber invites cleaning.

Trying to create a norm through an instruction often creates resistance. Visible civic affordances work because they show the behavior through humans. When someone sees another person easily performing an action in public space, it signals that the behavior is possible, acceptable, and even expected. Over time, this can spread and produce social norms.

In the context of parks, a trash grabber might be a good small example. In the same way that having a shovel in a blizzard gives us the option to clear a crosswalk, a trash grabber changes what actions feel available to us. We no longer need to bend down or touch garbage to pick it up. However, what the tools presence suggests might be even more important than the new ways to pick up trash it allows.

A trash grabber advertises that picking up trash is an allowed, if not expected, behavior in the park. When a behavior becomes visible and easy, it can spread socially. Artifacts can create social permission. However, many interventions like this don’t end up achieving their goals. What determines if they work or not?

Why Some Interventions Change Behavior and Others Don’t

There are many ways we can think about what makes a successful intervention (and I will explore more of them in the future), but for now we will use a simple model: behavior spreads when it is a) visible and b) easy to adopt. When a behavior is invisible or difficult, it rarely spreads.

Grocery stores used this principle decades ago when creating shopping cart corrals (the place you return a cart) by making the socially expected behavior both visible and easy. This example is so intuitive that we might not even think of it as design intervention. They advertise themselves, sit right where people exit stores, and don’t make anyone’s life harder. As a result this is such a norm that we can’t imagine a world without it. When tools make a behavior visible and easy, that behavior can become the norm.1

How does this apply to our trash grabber example? Well, depending on how it is placed, a trash grabber sitting unused in a park might have low visibility, but once one person uses it, the behavior becomes extremely visible. Picking up trash is not a frictionless behavior to add to your routine, but unlike a shopping cart corral, it doesn’t need to be. We are specifically targeting only the people who would pick up litter but rarely do so.

In the context of New York City, this is not meant to argue that we don’t need containerization, stewardship programs, or marketing campaigns. Instead, I’m arguing that trash grabbers can help those other interventions succeed by recruiting already motivated New Yorkers to help and making participation visible and easy. As a bonus, the visible act of cleaning may itself discourage future litter.

A Simple Experiment

Promisingly, this idea is cheap, easy to set up, and easy to undo. In fact all we need to do is install one and see if people use it.

This would require picking a park, partnering with a group like a Business Improvement District, park conservancy, or neighborhood group, and finding a place to put it. For our “before” condition we would observe and evaluate existing litter levels and park user behavior.

Then for our test we would install a trash grabber with a sign like “Keep Our Park Clean!” and attach a sticker that says “if found please return to [this] park!”

For one month, through observations we can see if people use the grabber, walk past it, pick up trash without it, or even steal it. Conversations with park users would provide qualitative feedback.

You might immediately think that these will get stolen. As a New Yorker, I agree that this is definitely possible or even probable, but that it is still worth testing. Site selection and placement within the park would play a large part in the likelihood of theft. This should be viewed as a part of the experiment and accounted for with multiple backup grabbers. For the sake of future policy decisions it is worth knowing if a trash graber accomplishes its goal, and if it does get stolen, how long it would take before someone took it. Luckily this is closer to a $50 question than a $5 million one.

How can we increase our civic affordances?

Trash grabbers are just one prototype that emerges from this way of thinking. If many people already want cleaner parks but lack social permission to act, the question is not just how to stop litterers. It’s how we can design public spaces that make helpful behavior visible and easy. Objects are not neutral. They signal what behavior belongs in a place.

Leverage Points and Why Physical Design Is Usually Overlooked

We all want to find places where small changes produce large effects. Donella Meadows called those places “leverage points.” In her essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,1 she ranked where interventions can have the most impact.

At the top of her list is something with an intimidating name: paradigm-level shifts. A paradigm shift is a term for when the model we use to think about the world changes because we realize it no longer applies. This just means the story we quietly assume about how the world works changes. If you’re familiar with paradigm shifts, you might think of scientific revolutions2, but paradigms also shape everyday civic life. Ideas like “parking is sacred,” “government can’t do big things well,” and “dogs are urban nuisances” are stories we absorb simply by engaging with the world as it is set up. In the pandemic, outdoor dining disrupted one of these stories by making a different use of curb space suddenly feel normal. To Meadows, these stories are the deepest leverage points in the system because usually when we find a mismatch between what we believe and how we act, we try to fix it. If paradigms shape behavior at the deepest level, the question becomes: how do they change?

These shifts are not always easy to come by, which is why I’m interested in something much lower on her list: the physical infrastructure of the world. She says that, “physical structure is crucial in a system, but rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple.” New Yorkers definitely know that physical changes are often neither quick nor simple. After all, it’s been 50 years and we’re still waiting for the Second Avenue Subway to be done. However, some structures are easier to change than we assume, and some of these small changes punch above their weight because they change our expectations. This is not to say that all urban design will change society, but certain small physical changes can subtly reshape what feels possible. The dog pee station is a very small example; outdoor dining is a large one.

How Physical Infrastructure Changes What Feels Possible

New Yorkers will intuitively know that physical infrastructure affects the paradigm. I know that when I leave NYC, and have to get into a car to get literally anywhere that I’m surprised people there view it as normal. I know they feel surprised when they come here and realize our default is the subway. Whether it’s the subway or a highway, physical infrastructure mediates our relationship with our city. The subway doesn’t just change how we get around, it changes the story we tell ourselves about society.

It’s easy to get caught up thinking of urban design as Robert Moses-era highways destroying communities, but it is also Paseo Park in Queens, school street programs, public bathrooms, and the DOT “summer streets.” Each of these smaller scale NYC programs change what we expect from public space. Those of us who witnessed Outdoor Dining know that these shifts don’t just change how we think, they change how we will act and design in the future.

What Makes an Urban Design Change a True Leverage Point

If we can find urban design interventions that people don’t have strong opinions about, are relatively cheap and quick to implement, actually change behavior, and do so in a way that take on a life of their own, we can shift the paradigm. These are changes that are small enough to implement but big enough to change what we think is possible. When infrastructure makes a behavior easy and visible, it becomes normal. When it becomes normal, what feels possible starts to shift. Once what feels possible shifts, other changes start to compound (I’ll explore that idea more in a future piece.)

A Small Example: Redirecting Dog Behavior

One example of this dynamic appeared on my block. Providing dogs a clear place to pee redirected them away from trees almost immediately. Something as simple as a sign that said “your dog can pee here!”, putting down some fake grass and adding a fake fire hydrant changed how a whole block of dog walkers behaved. Because of its visibility and behavior changing nature, even a small win like this can subtly change what we think local government is capable of. This intervention fits our criteria. It is visible, organically invites behavior change, becomes natural very quickly, and tells a new story about the role of government and public space in our city. In a future post, I’ll walk through what it would actually take to design and pilot an intervention like this in NYC.

So, if you’re looking for leverage, don’t just look at federal policy or elections. Look around you for small, visible interventions that alter what feels possible. As we’ve seen, they might change more than we expect.

As I post more I will flesh out proposals I have that I think fit this framework. If you have any ideas let me know and let’s talk!

Every busy dog owner faces the same question: when and where do our dogs go out? There are countless places we are told not to let them pee, marked with “Curb your dog” signs and tree guards…

But they clearly don’t work.

This is not just some prudish issue, it has costs for our green infrastructure that cools sidewalks, absorb stormwater, clean air, and make dense blocks livable. This is because Dog Urine Has Acute Impacts on Soil Chemistry in Urban Greenspaces. When a tree lives in a concrete box, there’s nowhere for pee to go when it rains. In a time of increasing droughts, the “Salt also draws out water from tree roots, further compounding water loss and simulating the effects of drought.”3

Additionally, dog pee produces the smell of baking urine that combines with baking trash to make that distinct NYC summer smell.

Dog pee is an inevitable byproduct of having dogs in NYC which clearly produces undesirable effects. However, when there is any conversation about dog pee, it revolves around how to stop dogs from peeing places, not about where they should instead pee to reduce these undesirable effects.4

So, instead of trying to message harder about where dogs shouldn’t pee, what if we instead provide a place for dogs to pee that reduces their undesirable effects?

Why Dogs Pee on Trees: Countermarking

Next time you’re on the street and notice dog pee, see if there are other pee stains nearby. I’d predict there are. It turns out dogs actually want to pee where other dogs pee.

Dogs follow scent, not signs, which makes a reinforcing feedback loop.

This means our real task is to:

1. Identify a new place for a reinforcing loop that is compatible with urban life and realistic.

2. Redirect dogs to that new loop.

   

In fact, we already know this works. This same mechanism is employed in airports, but private developments, like this one I saw in Hoboken, have also adopted building dog pee rest areas. Instead of stopping dogs from peeing, they simply provide a desirable place for the dogs to pee that addresses the concerns.

Why ‘Curb Your Dog’ Signs Don’t Work

The phrase “curb your dog” was not well received even when it debuted. In fact, the double use of “curb” is so confusing that in 1956, two Harvard law students reached out to the Department of Sanitation for clarification. Someone responded, saying, “Little did I think that the personal habits of dogs could be of even academic interest to students of Harvard Law School...The sign has both meanings. It means, ‘Restrain your dog.’ It also means, ‘get him off the sidewalk’”

People also just don’t heed the signs.

As my dad so often tells me, “When we’re out of the city, I’m used to letting [Penny] pee anywhere. But now, we’re back, and the tree she walks up to has a sign that says ‘please curb your dog.’ My dog pees in the woods, and it’s totally fine! Why should I bring her to the curb? She’s uncomfortable enough as it is. The street is full of cars, and she wants to pee here in what feels like quasi-nature. Isn’t this being a good dog owner?”

The truth is that, as it is, the curb just isn’t a good place for dogs to pee. It doesn’t provide an obvious place for dog owners to lead their dog and is often loud and full of cars. The result is that it is easier to just let the dog pee where they want to, often in tree beds. This is a problem that can not be solved by messaging.

But one day on my block, everything changed.

A Better Urban Design Solution for Dog Pee

In early June, my dad texted in our family group chat: “Jack, you have to see what’s at the corner.” This is what I found, in all its glory.

Someone had covered the tree bed5 with astroturf, put a fake fire hydrant, a sign that said “Your Dog Can Pee Here, Our Tree Is Protected,” and even a dog poop bag dispenser. They even built a protector around the trunk of the tree so the pee would not go on the trunk.

Penny got very comfortable peeing there very quickly. In fact, after a few days, she would even lead me there herself. Even my dad stopped letting Miss Penny Lane pee on the other trees. Suddenly, the ‘curb your dog’ signs and tree guards seemed to work as people acknowledged that they should bring their dogs to this new area. Or maybe they were just lured in by the free poop bags.6

I know this dog rest area worked because we would always see other dog walkers at this tree as well; sometimes we’d even strike up a conversation. These were the golden days. But, like many good things, they came to an end.

As some of you might have expected, the tree died. This may have been the result of the concentrated dog pee, or of the astroturf preventing water from reaching the soil. However the mechanism worked, so the next version just needs to be not on a tree.

What Cities Can Learn from a Failed (but Promising) Experiment

The loop redirection worked immediately. Behavior changed in days, and other dog walkers adapted without being told to.

Yes, the tree died, but that was a design problem, not a mechanism problem, and shifting norms is much harder than refining a design. For example, instead of being on a tree, this rest area could be on the curb near a hose and storm drain so it can be cleaned. For more on this read the “Design Playbook” where I expand on this.

We don’t need to convince thousands of dog owners to care more. We just need to give them somewhere obvious to go, and the system will rearrange itself.

For too long the question has been how to stop dogs from peeing in a place, but the right question is where we want it to happen.

Do you want to try something similar in your neighborhood or think more about redirecting dog pee? Read this follow up “Design Playbook” post for a practical pilot proposal.

Are you someone who can do something about this?7 Reach out; let’s make it happen. I’m happy to help plan, raise money, pilot, and evaluate.

Thanks for reading! If you have made it this far thinking about dog pee, we might get along. If you’re excited about practical8 ideas for big changes with a little effort, stick around. This post is part of a series on how small design changes reshape cities

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Miss Penny Lane is a particularly anxious dog, especially when there are loud trucks. I even tried buying her noise-cancelling headphones. Sadly, they didn’t work.