Mobilizing the High Line

One of the foremost icons of contemporary urban planning, design and redevelopment is New York’s world-renowned High Line. A 1.45-mile-long elevated linear park on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City, built upon a long-disused 1930s commercial rail viaduct, it has been praised as a design masterpiece, a public space innovation, and an economic development juggernaut. As an iconic project in a major world city, the High Line has also had considerable influence on urban planning, design, and development practices in cities around the globe. An ever-growing literature on the mobility and diffusion of planning has taken a keen interest in how ideas, models and policies like the High Line circulate and land. This research builds upon that work to investigate how the High Line has been mobilized into a phenomenon that can travel and how it influences practices around the world. As the High Line’s industrial past helps establish its current appeal as a reused urban artifact, this research begins with the structure’s history. Once a symbol of modernity and progress, the High Line’s postindustrial obsolescence transformed it from an asset to a liability. This transformation is a starting point for understanding the process by which the obsolete High Line, at one point believed to be an impediment to urban revitalization, could be re-envisioned as the centerpiece of a revitalized neighborhood. The process of building excitement and developing narratives, as well as its location in a capital of media, fashion, and finance, was integral in its mobilization. Probing the formation of the High Line’s mobilization through its imagery and narratives in globalized media and discourse, I argue that the High Line that is mobilized can be thought of as a ‘traveling urban imaginary.’ What really travels is a flattened, constructed, and aspirational phenomenon. Moving beyond the original site, the research develops a kind of High Line ‘family tree’ to map out the reach of the phenomenon and how it has been discursively constructed in the places it lands. Additional examination of ‘ancestors’ (such as the Promenade Plantée and Garden Bridge) and ‘descendants’ (such as the Reading Viaduct and Goods Line) reveals the continuities and discontinuities between the High Line in New York and the High Line that has become a mobilized phenomenon. This detailed investigation of the High Line as a real place and a mobilized phenomenon provides insights into the process of mobilization for contemporary exemplars of urban planning, design, and redevelopment. It reveals that while formal networks for policy and idea transfer (such as the Urban Land Institute and American Planning Association) still played important roles, contemporary global media and communications, along with other factors, played an outsized role in mobilizing the High Line and making it part of both professional and non-professional ‘repertories’. This contemporary dynamic accentuates the importance of the stories, narratives, and imaginaries by which the High Line is transferred, and the power dynamics and political projects that they carry. It probes why they have such strong influences on urban practices and politics, and argues for more reflective, careful consideration of such mobilized phenomena, particularly by professionals such as urban planners and designers.PHDUrban and Regional PlanningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138774/1/ianrt_1.pd