From urban scar to ‘park in the sky’: terrain vague, urban design, and the remaking of New York City’s High Line Park

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.