The Department of Tenderness

The City of New York has over 100 different agencies, departments, authorities, mayor’s offices, commissions, and boards, making it one of the largest and most complex bureaucracies in the US. We often take these structures for granted as fixed, when in reality, they are malleable — shaped as much by political and social priorities as by any grand vision of governance.

Speculative bureaucracies offer a way to examine this fluidity, revealing both the mundane mechanisms of government and the possibilities for alternative systems. From Public Sector Office to the Department of Transformation and LA Infrastructure Inspections, imagined agencies blur the line between reality and fiction, making visible the assumptions embedded in municipal structures while proposing new ways to organize public life.

What if there was a city agency devoted to love? It’s not a farfetched idea. The municipal government of Seongnam City in South Korea hosts matchmaking parties in an attempt to help singles find love and address record-low fertility rates.

Closer to home, artists and friends Schuyler deVos and Ezekiel Maben have created the Department of Tenderness (DOT), a speculative sister agency to the Department of Transportation. While the DOT has all the trappings of a traditional city agency — a clunky website, multi-page permit applications, and an appointed commissioner — its mandate is strikingly different. “The New York City Department of Tenderness’s mission is to provide for the safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible distribution and promotion of love and tenderness in the City of New York and to maintain and enhance the tenderness infrastructure crucial to the economic vitality and quality of life of our primary customers, city residents.”

The Department of Tenderness prompts us to ask: What if care and emotional infrastructure were as vital to city planning as roads and bridges?

Read the interview on Urban Omnibus.