Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park

by Christoph Lindner (Contributor), Brian Rosa (Editor), Tom Baker (Contributor)

2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The High Line, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway in Manhattan, is one of the world’s most iconic new urban landmarks. Since the opening of its first section in 2009, this unique greenway has exceeded all expectations in terms of attracting visitors, investment, and property development to Manhattan’s West Side. Frequently celebrated as a monument to community-led activism, adaptive re-use of urban infrastructure, and innovative ecological design, the High Line is being used as a model for numerous urban redevelopment plans proliferating worldwide.

Deconstructing the High Line is the first book to analyze the High Line from multiple perspectives, critically assessing its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts. Including several essays by planners and architects directly involved in the High Line’s design, this volume also brings together a diverse range of scholars from the fields of urban studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Together, they offer insights into the project’s remarkable success, while also giving serious consideration to the critical charge that the High Line is “Disney World on the Hudson,” a project that has merely greened, sanitized, and gentrified an urban neighborhood while displacing longstanding residents and businesses.

Deconstructing the High Line is not just for New Yorkers, but for anyone interested in larger issues of public space, neoliberal redevelopment, creative design practice, and urban renewal.  
 

232 pages, Hardcover

Published May 9, 2017

Reviews

[Julia]

select chapters

[Madeleine M · Rating 3 out of 5]

New York's High Line park, built on the tracks of a disused elevated railway, is a success story that has inspired imitators around the world. I visited it and loved it, but noticed that I was surrounded by fellow tourists. That – the fact that most visitors are tourists and not New Yorkers – is one of many criticisms featured in this book of essays. Other criticisms include:

~ The park can only be walked through and provides little space for relaxation and no space for playing games, having picnics, etc.
~ It prompted the hypergentrification of Chelsea.
~ It costs more to maintain per square acre than any other park in the city, requiring a level of care more appropriate for a botanical garden.
~ Money and energy has been diverted from projects in low-income areas toward this project.

And so on. I agree with some of the arguments more than others; in particular, I see no problem with a space dedicated to the bourgeois promenade instead of ball games. Nothing wrong with a nice walk, and the structure is inherently limiting. The essays are thought-provoking whether you agree with their conclusions or not, and I just wish they hadn't used Harvard referencing. It combines with academic jargon to create sentences that are truly godawful to read. Sample:

"Knopp remains strongly, if not centrally, concerned with "queer quests for identity" (Knopp 2004) even as queer theorists and feminists interested in many of the same ontological and biopolitical questions push for alternate framings of politics in terms of multispecies engagements (Giffney and Heard 2008), micropolitical/affective scales (Chisholm 2010), or imperceptibility (Grosz 2005), rather than emphasizing visibility or indulging in the taxonomic tendencies sometimes endemic to identity politics."

Please, make it stop.