New York’s Parks and Recreation Department is embarking on a bold new public initiative to make the city’s parks more open, welcoming and beautiful.

The Parks Without Borders scheme has received US$50m (€46.8m, £32.8m) from the city’s mayor to improve green spaces and better connect local communities. It has been launched as a public outreach campaign which allows citizens to vote for the parks they feel would most benefit from beautification.

“The public realm, including streets, sidewalks, parks and other public spaces, takes up about 40 per cent of New York City, and is a common resource that New Yorkers share every day,” parks commissioner Mitchell Silver told CLAD in an exclusive interview.

“This initiative flows from the idea that the public realm should be a unified space, promoting freedom of movement and making all parts of the public realm as seamless as possible.”

To achieve this, Parks Without Borders – a subsidiary of OneNYC, a group addressing New York’s long-term social, economic and environmental issues – is focusing on the parts of parks that interact most directly with surrounding neighbourhoods: entrances, edges, and park-adjacent spaces.

Design teams from within and outside the initiative will create “visual and physical connections” between the park and its surroundings by opening sight lines, lowering fences, adjusting gates and adding furnishings outside parks’ traditional borders. Entrances will be made more welcoming and easy to find and park boundaries will become greener and more comfortable.

Silver said: “An open design approach has innumerable benefits, from making people feel a greater sense of belonging and ownership with their parks to improving public safety by allowing better natural surveillance of public spaces.

“We’ll add amenities such as bicycle racks, public art and tables and seats, because a space with no place to sit is often not attractive for anything but passing through. Parks Without Borders will help create new public spaces that are currently only used for entering, leaving or passing by.”

Eight city parks will be initially selected for re-development from the public shortlist in February 2016. US$10m (€9.3m, £6.5m) of the budget will be used to update 30 existing sites chosen through a City Parks Initiative and will also fund future capital projects.

Parks Without Borders has a long-term goal of bringing more than 85 per cent of New Yorkers within a walk to a park, and Silver pledged that the campaign would continue to go from strength to strength, updating more green space in the future.

He added: “New York City is an incredibly complex place and every one of our almost 2,000 parks are unique in some way, which means there are nearly 2,000 ways to realise Parks Without Borders.

“This is an approach that can absolutely work in other cities as well. Co-ordinating the design of different parts of the public realm is the best way to make the most of limited public lands.”