Consider urban canals and their towpaths, many of which have been repurposed as pedestrian leisure ways. The C&O Canal in Washington, D.C., which links lockhouses and campsites far afield, is one example. Edinburgh has no fewer than five canals for fishing, rowing, running, and walking. Nearly 500 miles of towpaths link Bordeaux and Toulouse along the Canal des Deux Mers—a favorite of cyclists. Consider the adaptive reuse of airports like Tempelhof in Berlin, now an enormous public park. There are also highway underpasses in Boston; Miami; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; San Diego; and Toronto, which host skate parks, picnic benches, art installations, and ice-skating rinks. Consider all of the notable river walks in Chicago, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, Providence, and San Antonio.
Finally, and notably, there are more than 2,100 rail-trails in the United States alone for bikers, hikers, and overnight campers. In Europe, there are more than 11,800 miles of rail-trails in 19 countries. Among these, the Coulée verte René-Dumont is arguably the crown jewel—an elevated promenade tracing a railway that once connected central Paris to Verneuil-l’Étang, 37 miles to the east. Transformed into a 3-mile path in 1993 and slicing through the city like a knife through cake, it provides vital habitats for flora and fauna, as well as some of the most dramatic vistas of urbanist Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s handiwork. It’s also one of the last bastions of the strolling (or snoozing) flâneur in a city overrun with Lime scooters.
But, what gives these initiatives—often imagined and pursued by grassroots organizations, local councils, or deep-pocketed benefactors—the staying power required to contribute to the fabric of their adjacent communities?
It’s not just clever programming or needed amenities. It’s their collective promise of cultural and economic capital, and lots of cities want in on the action. Chicago, Houston, and New York are three such cities cited in Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City, the first book by Temple University assistant professor of sociology Kevin Loughran. Each city represents the sites of what he calls “postindustrial parks,” or reimagined infrastructure that pleases pedestrians and generates economic activity, including the elevated rails of Chicago’s Bloomingdale/The 606; New York’s High Line; and the urban parks and paths along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou.
Loughran addresses the real value of bolts, concrete, girders, and rebar—recovered, repaired, repainted, and reimagined—as a way of exploring the perceived value of nature in the “neoliberal park era,” which is rife with contradiction. Who pays for postindustrial parks and how? Who maintains these parks, for how long, and with what money? Will rampant privatization in American cities improve rampant urbanization and our collective quality of life? Do donors whose wealth is derived from destroying nature with an oil pipeline in one part of the world absolve themselves by creating a bit of green space in another? Loughran is reasoned and methodical in introducing and discussing these questions. The reader understands why he’s investigating these three sites, their industrial histories, and their post-industrial futures in tandem. Readers also understand why he calls them “win-win propositions,” but the twist of the book is parsing the definition of winning.
Places, of course, are real and propositions (win-win or otherwise) are only hypothetical. This book occupies a middle ground in asking what these new-old places propose for cities with aging or outmoded infrastructure. In greening these places, are we commodifying nature? Yes, says Loughran, but not in the sinister way that offends our sensibilities to privilege nature over profit. To commodify nature by making it the basis of infrastructure’s rebirth, in Loughran’s view, is to find new value in that which has been devalued. These three examples of urban entropy demonstrate how the second (or third) lives of outmoded infrastructure are enriched by nature, thereby appealing to society’s instinct toward the common good.
When you consider this list of “win-win” candidates, nature is the basis of the projects’ fortunes. Mayors and “eager elites” interested in legacy; city coffers and lucky landlords; adjacent neighborhood residents and tourists—all of them stand to gain. Quoting urban planner Robert Moses, who said, “Parks symbolized something good,” Loughran suggests that we’d be wise to accept this as a win for all of us—at least hypothetically—because the truly untenable position is to choose what historian Leo Marx called “the machine” over “the garden” (or even vice versa).
Marx, who died this past March, shows up in more than just Loughran’s chapter titles. He was one of the giants of the field of American Studies, and he wrote one of its most important studies in 1964, “The Machine in the Garden,” which created an enduring framework to consider America’s pastoral ideal and the necessities of industry. Marx connected the Transcendentalists, who resisted modernization (or at least claimed to), to F. Scott Fitzgerald—who accepted modernity (without approving of it)—and explored the great tension of American life and literature between nature’s majesty and our inevitable disruptions. It’s an unresolved tension for Marx and Loughran, who both find the choice between the garden or the machine an untenable proposition. Only the prospect of nature and machine, in relation to each other, is the engine of placemaking.
Drive south on the New Jersey Turnpike, “’neath the refinery’s glow out where the great black rivers flow,” to quote Bruce Springsteen, and you’ll eventually be enveloped by oak, walnut, and pine trees straddling the highway. Drive north through central New Hampshire, and you’ll glimpse white cedars, firs, spruces, and pines cossetting the Northern Railroad’s swaths blessed on opening day in 1847 by none other than 19th-century statesman Daniel Webster himself. I’ve spent a lot of time on these roads, and their unresolved tension between garden and machine doesn’t bristle with contradiction at all—it seems just about right.
As cities (and architects) push for a net-zero and climate-positive future, repurposing infrastructure rather than destroying it—not to mention capitalizing on the liminal spaces created by infrastructure—is common sense. We must get used to unresolved tensions in cities if we’re going to resolve the issues of climate crisis: clean water, food insecurity, and homelessness. “Behind the design of any park are assumptions about normative cultural practices,” Loughran writes. One could say the same about cities and communities. But can we make the sensible and healthy reinvention of our infrastructure a normative practice, too? If we accept machines and gardens as a package deal, then the answer is yes.
