Little Island is a $260 million park and performance space, largely funded by media mogul Barry Diller, built on stilts in the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan.Photographer: Gary Hershorn/Corbis News vi Getty Images
An on-again, off-again romance smolders between nature and the American city. It’s complicated.
The original matchmaker was 19th century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose picturesque green spaces like New York City’s Central Park offered urbanites an idealized experience of nature. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration built smaller neighborhood parks for the industrial working classes (though these, of course, were racially segregated and unequal).
Image: Columbia University Press
But as urban centers deindustrialized and white residents left for the suburbs, local governments often stopped maintaining parks, surrendering them, along with the industrial infrastructure these green spaces offered a reprieve from, to overgrowth and disrepair.
In recent decades, wealthy white residents have returned, and cities have kindled a new relationship with the natural landscape. New York City’s High Line, which repurposed an abandoned freight line as a 1.5-mile elevated walkway studded with plantings and artworks, introduced the world to the post-industrial park, a hybrid form that aestheticized wild nature and past labor — and generated billions in real estate investment. Suddenly, rotting bridges and polluted urban wetlands were opportunities, not eyesores. In the years since, cities have raced to grow them into curated green spaces for tourism, art and recreation.
This latest coupling is largely a transactional affair, Temple University sociologist Kevin Loughran argues in his new book Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City. Loughran focuses on three acclaimed post-industrial parks — the High Line, Chicago’s 606, and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park. All three spaces, Loughran writes, “serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investment”: Built largely with private funding and run by private entities, these popular attractions allow city governments to appear benevolent as they line the pockets of their real estate captors.
“There’s nothing inherently bad about building a new park,” Loughran says in an interview. “But why do these well-financed, well-connected private groups get to decide everything? Why do city governments just let them have free rein?”
By many metrics, all three represent adaptive reuse success stories. Showcases of landscape architecture that appeal to visitors and residents alike, these new green spaces not only inspired a slew of imitators in other cities but also proved their value to the community during the Covid-19 pandemic, when safe outdoor gathering spaces emerged as critical social infrastructure.
But Parks for Profit offers a timely counterargument to the urban cheerleading that promotes this model of privately funded showstopper spaces — seen most recently in New York City’s Little Island, a park and performance space that ripples on stilts atop a disintegrating pier on the Hudson River. Atlanta has a post-industrial park in the BeltLine, a still-in-progress greenway that has fueled development and triggered gentrification pressures on historically Black neighborhoods. St. Louis, Miami, and Washington, D.C., are creating their own fancy parks on disused infrastructure.
The book maintains that these spectacles exist to secure the cultural and economic interests of the wealthy, not to provide an amenity that serves a broader community. At the same time, they can price out working-class families of color and drain resources from neighborhoods that badly need development and green space.
How did we get to this point? In Loughran’s telling, history matters. Like the High Line, Chicago’s 606 is a linear park built around idled rail infrastructure; Buffalo Bayou Park reclaims several miles of Houston’s industrialized riverfront, which by the 1970s had become overgrown and polluted. “They’re affording a different kind of redevelopment opportunity for urban boosters, because these are brownfields.” Loughran says. “They’re things that have been part of the story of deindustrialization.”
That opportunity is both aesthetic and economic. In gentrifying neighborhoods, landscape architects have created popular public spaces by layering the pastoral (wildflowers, water features) onto the post-industrial (steel, concrete), evoking nostalgia for a lost urban wilderness. While the approach varies from city to city, the motive is the same: revalorizing — and wringing profit out of — derelict land.
The opening of the High Line helped fuel a steep rise in real estate values nearby. Photographer: Noam Galai/Getty Images
Rezoning for the High Line was the “linchpin of developing other sites on the far West Side” of Manhattan, Loughran writes; the new skyscrapers that tower over the park today serve as proof of concept. In Chicago, neighborhood advocates had long nurtured plans to green the decommissioned Bloomingdale Line, but it was only in 2011, when then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel made it a signature development project, that the 606 picked up steam. By the time the project opened in 2015, it had driven a 48% rise in property values on Chicago’s west side.
Houston’s elites had set their sights on redeveloping Buffalo Bayou to attract visitors to the city’s desolate downtown area since at least the 1970s, but it was the philanthropic attention of oil billionaires in the 2000s that brought the idea to life. When the park opened in 2015, it catalyzed plans for a $500 million mixed-use development, among other major real estate ventures.
All three projects owe their success to the rise of public-private partnerships in park management — a feature of the neoliberal turn in city planning that has “decreased investment in public services and increasingly relied on finance and philanthropy for shared goods,” Loughran writes. Cities interested in building post-industrial parks took their cues from Friends of the High Line, a private nonprofit organization formed to manage the park’s initial capital campaign. For the 606, Chicago worked with the Trust for Public Land, a master at using corporate money to build parks, to raise $20 million of private funding toward fast-tracking the $95 million project. This strategy reached an apotheosis in Houston, where the nonprofit Buffalo Bayou Partnership raised 91% of the park’s initial $58 million price tag from private donors, including $30 million from Houston energy magnate Rich Kinder.
In car-centric Houston, Buffalo Bayou Park provides a respite for walkers and bikers. Photographer: Callaghan O'Hare/Bloomberg
The effect has been to place the decision-making process for parks increasingly in the hands of unelected entities and their monied donors, an arrangement that “actively harms poorer communities,” Loughran writes.
That harm can come in the form of increased displacement pressures on low-income residents of color, a phenomenon often dubbed “green gentrification” that has threatened some who live near the 606. Several prominent Latino neighborhood associations that supported the park have pivoted to helping low-income residents hang onto their homes amid soaring property values, the book notes. Similarly, Buffalo Bayou Park was, according to Loughran, a bid by elites to further “whiten” downtown Houston. It forms a new front in a long-term movement to rebrand its surrounding neighborhoods — including the development of an entertainment district, high-end hotels and luxury housing — that had already contributed to the gentrification of nearby historically Black neighborhoods over the previous two decades.
At the same time, parks in poor communities elsewhere often suffer from disinvestment and neglect as cities slash municipal budgets. Houston consistently cut parks funding between 2005 and 2017, Loughran notes; New York City and Chicago also reduced parks funding in 2021, amid pandemic-era losses in revenue.
“There are plenty of parks,” Loughran says. “But they’re not getting the kinds of economic resources that they did in the past.” Meanwhile, post-industrial parks can be costly strains on parks budgets, with demanding maintenance needs.
Private management presents its own problems. While all three parks technically fall under the jurisdiction of their municipal parks departments, the High Line and Buffalo Bayou Park are run day-to-day by their nonprofit partners, an arrangement that lends itself to rules not found in city-run parks. The High Line for instance, keeps shorter hours and bans pets and bikes. More harmful, Loughran notes, are the private security firms and camera surveillance systems such parks employ to uphold their exalted status and screen out the kinds of unauthorized uses — often by low-income or homeless populations — seen in ordinary parks.
Little Island offers a supercharged variation on this theme. Funded largely through the philanthropy of media mogul Barry Diller, who put up $260 million in construction costs and another $120 million for upkeep over 20 years, the park is located in a part of Manhattan already well supplied with green spaces — and just a few blocks from the High Line. When Robert Hammond, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line, was asked at a recent Pratt Institute forum about Little Island, he said that he initially told Diller not to pursue to fanciful project.
“I thought that he shouldn’t do it here,” Hammond said. “It should be in a different neighborhood [that] needed it more.” But the force of these projects seems irresistible: Hammond joined Little Island’s governing board, and today he’s a fan: “Now that it’s open, I feel so wrong.”
Salesforce Park, seen from above in San Francisco in 2020.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America
Little Island has a West Coast counterpart in San Francisco’s Salesforce Park, a stunningly landscaped path perched on a refurbished bus terminal in the shadow of the corporate headquarters of the tech company that funded and branded it. In each, you see the same aesthetic moves, feats of design that play on the infrastructure that hosts them. Dropped into neighborhoods that have long since succumbed to hyper-gentrification, they could hardly be expected to drive further investment. Why, then, do they exist? “They’re monuments to billionaire vanity,” Loughran says. “Little Island is a logical conclusion of the outsized role these billionaires play in current urban development.”
What could be done to put public institutions back in charge of public spaces and ensure that parks are funded equitably across cities? In the pleasingly provocative section that closes Parks for Profit, Loughran counsels that cities should simply “let the rails rot.” That would mean, for starters, not turning urban wildernesses into “green Disneylands,” he writes. After all, people were visiting these no-go zones well before they were transformed into “manicured spaces,” but not the right people in the right ways. Urban planners could make less dramatic intervention into overgrown infrastructure — a “humble addition of new stairways, ramps, and elevators,” perhaps.
But Loughran recognizes that this is unlikely, given these parks’ broad public popularity. “Even critics must admit that the parks have an undeniable appeal, offering needed public spaces and unique vantage points on urban landscapes,” he writes.
More practical may be his call to abolish the private park corporations, conservancies and trusts that direct donor funds to a handful of flagship spaces while others decay. Such reform would not be unprecedented. Progressive-era activists like Hull House advocated for “small parks” and playgrounds for the working classes in the early 20th century; groups like the Urban League pushed to desegregate city parks during the civil rights era. A similar wave of grassroots advocacy could demand that public institutions run public spaces, that resource-starved parks be restored, and especially that the relationship between private money and public goods be severed.
If the romance of nature in the city is to survive, democratic control must prevail; private parks corporations are a toxic influence, Loughran insists.
“These organizations really shouldn’t exist,” he says. “The public should have ownership of these spaces.”