No postwar New York mayor was as interested in urban design as John Lindsay. He believed that the look and feel of the city, and its use of space, were key to New York’s economic and cultural wellbeing. “For New York to progress as the greatest city in the world, we must consciously guide and plan its development,” he argued. “Good design is one of the elements which must enter into our efforts to create a more livable City.”

As suburbanization scattered the nation’s population, Lindsay’s urban designers instead celebrated concentration, seeking to encourage density, mixed use, and preservation of the cityscape. The tools they deployed were diverse: special zoning districts, rezoning and transfer of development rights incentives, and landmark designation. Urban design was seen as a strategy for sustaining New York as a global, 24-hour city.

In pursuit of this goal, the Mayor enlisted the City Planning Commission and created an array of new entities, including the Urban Design Group and Mayor’s Development Offices, which were responsible for working with the local communities. They sought to elevate urban planning into an instrument of public policy through targeted zoning strategies that aimed to leverage private development dollars for the public interest. For example, in the special theater district, the administration and local community boards worked with developers, allowing extra height or bulk for new buildings in exchange for the construction of theaters. 

New York’s landmark preservation movement had emerged by the end of the administration of Lindsay’s predecessor, Robert F. Wagner.  The Lindsay administration worked to advance this cause through new strategies such as the sale of air rights over historic buildings and their transfer to developers looking to add lucrative height to new projects.

One of the other cornerstones of the Lindsay administration’s public policy regarding urban spaces was a program to make the city’s parks as friendly as possible to the largest number of visitors. Under the leadership of Lindsay's first parks commissioner, Thomas P. F. Hoving, the administration closed Manhattan’s Central Park to traffic for the first time and organized a series of what in the 1960s were called “happenings,” including concerts, mural painting, star gazing, and other free-form events, as well as lifting the ban on political events. Critics complained that these events disturbed the tranquility of the parks and damaged their facilities, and indeed by the end of the administration, the uses of the parks had outstripped the ability of the city to maintain them.