Repurposing the High Line: Aesthetic experience and contradiction in West Chelsea

Abstract

Abstract New forms of urban development harness aesthetic experience in order to secure, legitimate and reproduce class inequality and social exclusion. Our research on the repurposed elevated rail tracks that form the base of the High Line Park (HLP) and nearby development in New York City's West Chelsea neighborhood investigates one instance of urban aestheticization processes and their contradictions. Drawing on a variety of ethnographic, textual and photographic sources, we analyze how aesthetic components of the landscape shape the social interaction that occurs in and through these spaces; the manner in which the views from the HLP orchestrate visitors' perception of the city; how choices made about what to preserve and what to obscure from the industrial past shape our understanding of history and how new additions to the site such as plantings, public art, and amphitheaters communicate to visitors how they are to interact with each other, who “belongs,” who to fear and with whom to identify. We also explore how design occludes an understanding of the material phenomen a that undergird the neighborhood's transformation and the low-income residents who continue to share the neighborhood with the new urban elite.