CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Patrick, Darren Joseph |
|---|---|
| Title | The Politics of Urban Sustainability: Preservation, Redevelopment, and Landscape on the High Line |
| Summary | In this thesis, I focus on the preservation and reuse of the High Line in New York City. The High Line is a 1.45-mile long elevated railway running through two New York City neighborhoods: the West Village and Chelsea. Following its abandonment for industrial use in the 1980s, the structure became the focus of two significant preservation and reuse debates. The first, led by small citizen activism groups, was primarily articulated in the terms of urban preservation, anti-demolition, and slowing real estate development. The second, led by Friends of the High Line, which now manages the High Line, was primarily articulated in the terms of reuse and public access. Friends of the High Line succeeded in that they stopped the remainder of the structure from being demolished and eventually supported a comprehensive reuse plan, rendering the structure as a publicly accessible elevated park. My analysis focuses first on analyzing the second preservation and reuse effort as a case of ecogentrification, which combines discourses of ecological modernization, sustainability, and urban growth. From there, I move to a critical analysis of landscape urbanism, an approach to development and park design embraced and promoted by James Corner Field Operations, the lead of the High Line redesign team. Using a combination of Lefebvrian spatial theory and Gilles Clément’s notion of the third landscape as a space of indecision, I call for a critical reevaluation of the meaning of sustainability as embraced by the High Line. |
| Supervisor | Bodnar, Judit |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/patrick_darren.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University