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Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park
Current price:
$36.95
Publication Date: May 9th, 2017
Publisher:
Rutgers University Press
ISBN:
9780813576459
Pages:
232
Description
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.
Praise for Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park
"Friends of the High Line has also been trying to make up for lost time, launching arts and jobs initiatives with residents of nearby public housing. Danya Sherman, former director of public programs, education, and community engagement for Friends of the High Line, details these efforts in her contribution to Deconstructing the High Line, a series of essays by academics, architects, and those involved in the making of the elevated park... Before the High Line proffered progressivism through its programming, other contributors to the book note, it cast cold, hard capitalism in concrete. In recent years, mountains of ink have been spilled about how the ills facing contemporary New York and cities around the globe have been exacerbated by the High Line's complicity ... Other books about the High Line either don't engage these critiques or only do so through the eyes of Hammond and Friends of the High Line co-founder Josua David."
— The Village Voice
"Deconstructing the High Line is a timely, insightful, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary study that dares to critically examine the widely celebrated High Line from a variety of social, political, and cultural perspectives."
— Dora Apel
"At last! A smart book on the High Line that places it critically in both a local and a global frame! Since the High Line has quickly become a global pace maker among local place makers, this critical, multidimensional view is absolutely necessary to understand the political forces and aesthetic displacements that are reshaping our cities and our lives."
— Sharon Zukin
"This book teaches us that an all-inclusive approach from the point of view of urban theory is needed to better understand the effects of projects of urban, social and economic 'improvement.'"
— Urbanistica informazioni