In an article titled “Terra Fluxus”, the High Line’s designer James Corner himself (2006: 28) argues that landscape u rbanism “suggests shifting attention away from the object qualities of space (whether formal or scenic) to the systems that condition the distribution and density of urban form”.

And yet, there is a tendency among those disciplines dealing with “nature” – landscape architecture included – to compress complex phenomena into “a flat, colourless cartoon” (Cronon 1995: 35), ignoring the social, political, economic and cultural particularities of the context involved.2 Corner challenges this view in his article, citing Marxist geographer, David Harvey (quoted in Corner 2006: 28):3

‘the struggle’ for (landscape) designers and planners lies not with spatial form and aesthetic appearances alone but with the advancement of ‘more socially just, politically emancipatory, and ecologically sane mix(es) of spatio-temporal production processes, rather than the capitulation to those pro cesses, imposed by uncontrolled capital accumulation, backed by class privilege and gross inequalities of political-economic power.’

In other words, the breathtaking design of the High Line was only part of the job of the landscape urbanist; other responsibilities included creating socially just, politically emancipatory and ecologically balanced designs.

So did the landscape urbanism of the High Line fulfil these other responsi bilities? Sadly, not according to me, and certainly not according to the man that Corner uses to justify the practice of landscape urbanism. In 2010, David Harvey was quoted as commenting that (Lindsay 2010: 6):

the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favourable to developers….and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists…, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast g ated community for the rich.

Bloomberg is charged with “leverage[ing] public land and money to turn parks into self-sustaining enterprises”, u ltimately creating a “two-tier parks system” (Arden 2010: 6). On one tier are spe c tacular, exclusive and expensive parks like the High Line,4 Madison Square Park and Union Square Park while on the other are neighbourhood parks like Canarsie and Flatlands in Southeast Brooklyn, that provide space for plebeian activities like

Economic & Political Weekly

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february 18, 2012

sports, barbeques, picnics and walks. Their growing alterity is evidenced by at least two-mutually reinforcing factors: (1) the lack of public funding of social infrastructure and human r esources, and (2) the privatisation of successful parks eliminating cross-subsidisation to support other parks.5

In 1960, the time of retirement of New York’s infamous “master builder” Robert Moses, the New York Department of Parks and Recreation was the largest urban parks system in the United States (US). It boasted over 35,000 acres of land and received 1.4% of the city’s funds for parks’ maintenance and operations. U nder Mayor Bloomberg’s gigantic 2010 city budget of $63.6 billion, the fraction allocated towards New York City’s parks was a paltry 0.37% (or $239 million) (Arden 2010: 11, 12).6 These budget cuts have resulted in the downgrading of the park’s workforce to around 3,000 employees: around half the number that was employed in 1970. So while lower income parks like Canarsie and Flatlands have just one dedicated maintenance worker each for 1,200 acres of parkland, the 2.8 acres of the High Line are tended to by a team of maintenance workers including gardeners, custodians and bathroom attendants (ibid). In the Bronx, 6,970 acres are patrolled by five-tosix security officers, while the High Line is patrolled by double the number (ibid).

In the past, it was customary for parks to pay close to 20% of their concessions revenues to build and maintain the parks system, but with the increasing reliance on private-public partnership models, “special arrangements” are made so that the percentage of revenues paid to the city are greatly reduced (ibid: 40). One “special arrangement” is that the Friends of High Line keep all of the money from park concessions. In diverting what was traditionally city income that could have been redistributed to other neighbourhood parks, these profits have ended up as handsome rewards to philanthropically inclined individuals. Robert Hammond, the founder of Friends of High Line, pocketed over $1.2 million over a 10-year period (ibid).

Conclusions

It could be argued that parts of the movement have contributed to just what Corner wished it would oppose: “uncontrolled

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capital accumulation, backed by class privilege and gross inequalities of politicaleconomic power” (2006: 28). The High Line has in fact become “a huge magnet for development” with more than 30 new projects already commissioned or partially constructed at the time of its inauguration (Kilgannon 2010). It is beginning to resemble that predictable form of gentrification where “shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate” as part of “a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfil (bourgeois) urban dreams” (Lindsay 2010: 5).

In his critique of landscape urbanism, American urban designer Graham Shane asserts that landscape urbanism is a response to a particular type of American u rbanism, typical to Detroit, characterised by “Henry Ford’s myopia, racism and antiurbanism” (Shane 2003: 7). In embracing landscape urbanism for its small-scale and bottom-up approaches, we should not lose sight of the fact that other cities – in the US and elsewhere – are not organised along these principles and may not require a landscape urbanist response. He goes on to remind us that “the foundations of a true urbanity” are social justice and equality.

o ften drawn on models proposed by the west – the 1962 Master Plan of Delhi, for example, is an outstanding example of American regionalism. Vision 2021 now envisages Delhi as “a global metropolis and a world-class city” and just like New York, there have been disturbing trends and increasing evidence of the city’s poor experiencing growing spatial and social injustice (Dupont 2011). Before we drink the landscape urbanism Kool Aid that proposes “moving from both modernist and New Urbanist models of ordering the city …to more open-ended, strategic models” (Corner 2006: 28), it may serve us well to critically examine – using the High Line as a template – whose strategies and whose ends are being served, and at whose expense.

Notes

1 As its name suggests, the serpentine mile and a half long project is located on Manhattan’s West Side. Beginning at Gansevoort Street and progressing through the Meatpacking district, the elevated park is conceived as fairly linear, running between 10th and 11th Avenues, until

COMMENTARY

2 In order to answer the aforementioned questions, I will be drawing from the largely interdisciplinary fields of the humanities, detailed by Cronon in his 1995 work. He reminds us that scholars from the humanities, which include anthropologists, ethno graphers, and literary theorists, have demonstrated that “the natural world is far more dynamic, far more changeable, and far more entangled with human his tory” (1995: 24) than traditionally acknowledged. So what the humanities offer, in addition to a shifting of focus from product to process, is an embedding of these products and processes within the larger context of human history.

3 Note that Corner (2006) mis-cites the Harvey source. The quote is from Harvey (1998: 56).

4 Mayor Bloomberg’s support of the High Line as part of his larger agenda of encouraging publicprivate partnerships to renew the city was instrumental in its creation. The High Line, a paltry

5 In light of the current Commonwealth Games scandal and the issues of corruption plaguing the country, there is a third factor worth mentioning. This involves the unholy nexus between private interests and elected representatives who reallocate dwindling public funds towards the more exclusive parks. Christine Quinn, the current speaker of the New York City Council and “a leading supporter of the High Line project” during her controversial third-term council re-election, received $54,343 campaign funding from the Friends of High Line board members. While this practice of receiving campaign funding from private parties with vested interests is not considered illegal in the US, it is perceived as bribery in most other countries of the world. In April 2008, the New York Times unearthed a scheme that allowed Quinn, “to hand out funds for pet projects throughout the year”. In 2008 alone, $4.5 million of public money, and $17.4 million since 2001, was handed out in political favours, receiving only meek criticism that public funding was being “bestowed without accountability” (Editorial 2008).