Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City

by Kevin Loughran

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and community benefits. Yet there are clear economic motives as well--successful parks have helped generate billions of dollars of city tax revenues and real estate development.

Kevin Loughran explores the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago, and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston to offer a critical perspective on the rise of the postindustrial park. He reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals. As urban economies have become restructured around finance, real estate, tourism, and cultural consumption, parks serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investment. Tracing changing ideas about cities and nature and underscoring the centrality of race and class, Loughran argues that postindustrial parks aestheticize past disinvestment while serving as green engines of gentrification.

A wide-ranging investigation of the political, cultural, and economic forces shaping park development, Parks for Profit reveals the social inequalities at the heart of today's new urban landscape.

Genres: Urban Planning, Sociology

304 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2022

Reviews

[Nils Jepson · Rating 2 out of 5]

really disappointing. all of Loughran's arguments are presented as inevitable and uncontested when they're actually just lazy and full of fallacies i.e. there's a section that compares the pedestrian flow on the High Line to the no-sleeping ordinances in Skid Row and calls that analysis. everything here is hegemonic, panopticonal and all-encompassing; there is no room for contest. Loughran funnels every decision made by a parks planner or supporter into his argument that these spaces are "prospective investments in whiteness" which, well yes, is then never backed-up with any kind of data/analysis of how these spaces invest in whiteness outside the acknowledgement that they raise property values (which yes! but there is no case study here that actually lays out how that process happens). why didn't he talk to anyone!!! he uses every piece of evidence to support his larger argument by simply saying it does. that park uses native plants? evil. that park uses non-native plants? colonial. that park is in a bayou? fake. that park is not in a bayou? urbanism. that park has too many nooks? panopticonal. that park doesn't have enough nooks? bad park and anti-gay.

Loughran misses a central contradiction around the fact that a lot of people (non-white residents included...well, maybe not the high line) love these parks! and yet they still displace and surveil space. why and how?

sad because there are really interesting political economic/ecological bits here about the revival of postindustrial parks, both in a larger context of decreasing production and increasing consumption (and the associated spatial fixes and finance mechanisms) and in terms of sociopolitical representations of "nature." alas, the literature goes un-cited and when it is it remains broad; i.e. nature is socially constructed and let's leave a footnote and call it a day.

master plans are contested everyday, by both people and flora and fauna. you wouldn't know it in Parks for Profit, though. Plans here are god, making this a really, really boring read.

a lot of Loughran's claims, while probably right, are unfounded and uncritical. the case studies are used to justify claims already probably set out by Loughran in his outline. both a boring book and a boring way to look at life and nature. he needs to read Marx.

[Ashley Hamm · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars = average of 5 stars for what I learned and because I agree with the conclusions of the book and 3 stars for the writing style. This book illuminates something that can be hard to show - the negative effects of private investment in public parks. What could be bad about generous people donating money to revitalize parks? Apparently a lot.

[Maddie Weller · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating analysis of parks in cities, specifically walking trails for the purpose of transport and leisure as modeled by the high line. organized and relatively okay to read, wording is slightly complex for the educated but not specialized, however the concepts are accessible and digestible