From urban scar to ‘park in the sky’: terrain vague, urban design, and the remaking of New York City’s High Line Park
- 1 September 2015
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
- Vol. 47 (11), 2324-2338
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x15599294
Abstract
This paper considers New York City’s High Line Park, a linear stretch of green space situated on a discontinued railroad track in Manhattan. Unveiled in 2009, the High Line has become one of the most visited tourist sites in the city, but critics have called attention to its role in the gentrification of its surrounding neighborhoods and ties to extensive real estate development in the region. More specifically, many critics have focused on the project’s dramatic redesign of the site’s accidental landscape, which was a product of decades of abandonment and spontaneous plant growth. Drawing from contemporary literature that sees urban wastelands as sites of creative possibility, these critics have mourned the contemporary High Line’s redesign for its rejection of a space that offered more creative possibility. At the same time, the park’s designers themselves have argued that the redesigned park preserves the site’s transgressive spirit through purposeful design elements. In this paper, I analyze these conversations and consider how differing ideas about design and accidental urban nature are being engaged with by critics of the park. I celebrate criticisms of the park’s role in gentrification, but caution against the idea that abandoned urban spaces offer an implicit critique to neoliberal urban governance.Keywords
This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:
- How can wastelands promote biodiversity in cities? A reviewLandscape and Urban Planning, 2014
- Residues of a Dream WorldTheory, Culture & Society, 2011
- The limits of ‘neoliberal natures’: Debating green neoliberalismProgress in Human Geography, 2010
- Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the CityInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009
- Environmental issues: inventive lifeProgress in Human Geography, 2008
- Badlands of the RepublicPublished by Wiley ,2007
- An archaeology of fear and environmental change in PhiladelphiaGeoforum, 2006
- Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geographyProgress in Human Geography, 2005
- Neoliberalizing Nature? Market Environmentalism in Water Supply in England and WalesAnnals of the American Association of Geographers, 2005
- The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong NatureEnvironmental History, 1996