Abstract
City living and the design of the built environment can often leave residents quite stressed and in search of solace and relaxation in nature. Parks, for decades (and arguably longer than that), have been designed by planners and landscape architects to provide “authentic” spaces of “nature” where residents might forget social ills and connect with the environment in spaces. In large urban parks, for example Central Park in New York City or Piedmont Park in Atlanta, one might forget that they are actually even in the city given the design’s intentional focus on creating spaces that mimic the “wild” of nature.
In Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City by Kevin Loughran, the focus shifts to a new type of park that really began to be popular in the twenty-first century—the postindustrial park—often epitomized by New York City’s High Line Park in Chelsea. The High Line park is a 1.45-mile-long linear park that sits atop the High Line elevated rail viaduct and offers dazzling views of Chelsea with scenes combining rusting steel from the rail line with wildflowers and other plants along its pathways. The High Line became a massive tourist destination in New York City that offers several perceived benefits: it allows for tourists and young professionals to show that they are “cool” and often buy high-status cultural goods (foods, drinks, etc.) on a walk through the park; creates a demand for business and real estate opportunities in Chelsea close to the park; promotes, at least symbolically, a connection to nature, equity, and sustainability that leads to broad support for the park; and allows for the development of the neighborhood in a way that was met with less opposition than what was often seen with past efforts of urban development in the twentieth century through “slum clearance,” stadium building, interstate highway building, and so forth. That being said, the High Line also fueled gentrification of a racially diverse area of Chelsea and largely benefited more affluent residents and the business class; and in many ways it was designed for an imagined White and more affluent community that would move there. Loughran also outlines similar projects inspired by the High Line, in Chicago with the Bloomingdale Trail/606 and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, to discuss similar yet unique trajectories largely shaped by the local context: history, ecology, and elites.
The book offers several major contributions, primarily overlapping with its main sections. First in “Part I: Introduction,” Loughran provides a history and overview of the High Line, 606, and Buffalo Bayou Park, as well as the postindustrial spaces and neighborhoods where they will be developed. Chapter One, “Sometime in 2009,” sets the stage for the book and outlines some of the major themes of the book with particular attention to the New York High Line as an example. Chapter Two, “Varieties of Urban Crisis,” goes into the industrialization and deindustrialization of space in New York, Chicago, and Houston that made these park projects possible. Understanding the context of industrialization and deindustrialization of these spaces is vital in understanding how their reimagining as postindustrial parks is possible.
“Part II: Growth Machines in the Garden” offers a major contribution of the book, namely linking some of the literature on park development and design to urban growth machine literature à la Harvey and Molotch’s (2007) Urban Fortunes. As one can imagine, this part focuses primarily on urban growth machine actors (boosters, elites, organizations for or against the park, etc.); however, there is some discussion of opposition and resistance. Chapter Three, “The Yuppie Express,” focuses on the growth machine efforts to transform the High Line viaduct into a park, especially against efforts of other elites who wanted to convert it into a transit line or demolish it outright. The Friends of the High Line, a group of local boosters consisting of old-money elites, celebrities, and powerful business, civic, and political leaders, had to navigate different political contexts in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to ultimately transform the neighborhood and get public and private investment in their plans.
Chapter Four, “No More Bake Sales, Man,” focuses on the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago and the growth machine efforts associated with it. Like New York City’s High Line, the 606 is another “rails-to-trails” space that offers a linear walking path with various nods to nature as well as other recreational activities like biking. Unlike the High Line, the 606 is a straight line; however, it is proximate to a Puerto Rican neighborhood that would experience significant development and gentrification as the park proceeded. The Friends of Bloomingdale Park were one of the major groups central to this particular park and represented civic, recreational, and cultural leaders, not as much economic. Proponents of the park had to navigate multiple political regimes, especially those of mayors Daley and Emanuel, and align with the Trust for Public Land to ultimately break ground.
Chapter Five, “A Piece of Crud,” focuses on Buffalo Bayou Park, which is not based on a rails-to-trails space but a bayou and highway ecological conflux, and the growth machine history of its development. This park is unique from the other two because it was also designed to help with flood control, which was ultimately tested by Hurricane Harvey. Unlike the other two parks as well, this was largely led by political and economic elite without as much boosterism from local civic organizations, and fewer funds came from public sources (primarily private, like the Kinder family).
Chapter Six, “Parks for Profit or for People?” is quite short but asks very important questions, especially around equity and who benefits from these parks, despite the symbolic marketing of these spaces as connectors of diverse neighborhoods and inclusive places. Ultimately, White, able-bodied, middle- and upper-class residents and visitors are the main benefactors, as well as businesses, developers, and local real estate leaders who made tidy profits as a result of these parks. This chapter provides important contributions to the literature on urban growth machines, park planning and design, and urban planning more broadly, both in terms of the history and social processes leading to the building of these parks and also in terms of theory and concepts.
“Part III: Gardens in the Machine” focuses more on the design of these parks and is one of the major contributions of the book, especially around urban planning and design, the social construction of place, and the social construction of “nature.” Arguably, these chapters are the strongest and most important due to their theoretical and conceptual contributions. Chapter Seven, “Defective Landscapes,” begins with the tension between the social construction of nature and efforts to bring nature back to cities, especially the legacy of parks in the past based on the “picturesque” cultural style vis à vis these new parks in postindustrial and highly commercialized space.
Chapter Eight, “Imbricated Spaces,” focuses on the history of the construction of parks and social construction of nature moving from being in opposition to urbanism and urbanization to embracing it with new postindustrial parks. It is perhaps one of the strongest chapters in the book. Chapter Nine, “Constructing Environmental Authenticity,” focuses on the strategies that postindustrial park developers and designers used to bring the picturesque—previously in opposition and exclusion to “the urban,” both in terms of people (working-class and racialized city residents) and buildings—to these new parks while embracing urban buildings and infrastructure while still rejecting and excluding working-class and racialized residents through surveillance and limits on curtains types of activities. This leads to Chapter Ten, “Spatial Practices and Social Control,” which outlines the practices of social exclusion, especially the emphasis on walking, in these parks in greater detail. This is another excellent contribution to the literature that this book provides.
“Part IV: The Conclusion” rounds out the book with some concise but powerful chapters. Chapter Eleven, “After the High Line,” examines broader trends related to similar broader postindustrial parks in relation to the High Line, especially in relation the urban process in capitalism. In particular, it focuses on the efforts by growth machine elites to market the park as a place for “equity,” “community engagement,” and “sustainability” while at the same time enacting revanchist economic and social outcomes and policies. Chapter Twelve, “Abolish, Decolonize, and Rot,” offers three main policy recommendations based on the research of the book, as well as best practices by activists in this area. The first recommendation is “Abolish private park corporations”; the second is “Decolonize the links between race, capital, and the aesthetics of nature”; and the third is “Let the rails rot.” The explanations of these recommendations are concise yet convincing.
Despite the many strengths of the book, there are a few small critiques, which may go beyond the purview of the book or could be related to editorial choices and not the choices of the author. First, the pictures and figures in the book, especially of the maps and layout of the parks, are currently stuck near the end of the book’s main content without any direct connection to the text. If those pictures and figures were embedded throughout chapters to illustrate specific points, this would really help readers imagine and understand the spaces and places that the author explores.
Second, the choice of parks and cities has some discussion, especially what each park represents; however, there is less discussion of why these particular parks were chosen rather than others throughout cities in the United States. Atlanta’s Beltline in particular stands out as a similar type of park to the High Line (also rails-to-trails); however, the scale (22 miles of linear park currently developed or under construction connecting a huge array of neighborhoods) and economic impact (over $8 billion in private investment) seems to warrant a mention (Waters 2022), although perhaps I am biased given that I work and live in Atlanta. Relatedly, the literature on green gentrification, green urbanism, and urban development, often in response to the Beltline in Atlanta (Immergluck 2009; Immergluck and Balan 2018), seems theoretically and conceptually relevant to the arguments made in the book.
The work of Curran and Hamilton (2012) on “just green enough” activism of residents to “green” a neighborhood without causing massive gentrification in “Greenpoint,” Brooklyn seems relevant, especially to the conclusions. Curran and Hamilton (2012:1039) state “(t)he alternative vision for urban sustainability constructed in Greenpoint is one we understand as ‘just clean enough,’ in which as much of the environmental hazard as possible is removed in order to assure community health while still allowing for industrial uses on the waterfront for the explicit purpose of maintaining the area’s working-class population.”
Third, the book focuses primarily on the growth machine aspects and actors related to the parks and less on resistance to them. One could write a whole other book focusing on resistance to these parks so perhaps this is an unfair critique, but I think readers will be wondering how the neighborhoods and residents, especially from diverse and marginalized backgrounds, mobilized for or against the parks at various stages of development. The voices of residents, especially people of color, queer, and lower-SES individuals living in these gentrifying neighborhoods, are not regularly heard in the book; however, there is definitely extensive reference to their exclusion from these spaces and places.
Overall, the book is well written and engaging, and I would recommend it for an advanced undergraduate or a graduate course on urban sociology, environmental sociology, community studies, sustainability (especially from a critical perspective), or urban planning or design. Due to some of the advanced vocabulary, it may or may not be appropriate for a first- or second-year undergraduate course, and I would advise instructors to read over the book first before deciding. I would also highly recommend this for “urbanists,” parks and recreation workers and officials, city planners and politicians, and government officials more broadly. As we move toward sustainability being a major focus in how we invest public and private dollars and how we construct places in the era of climate change, this book provides an important critique of parks as beneficial to all. It is timely and intellectually rigorous. I highly recommend it.