Bola Sociology Design

Design+Sustentability: High Line

June 16th, 2009

Build in the 30’s and closed in the 80’s the High Line was an elevated railway that crossed through a part of Manhattan.

Recently reopened, it has passed by a reinterpretation of its spaces and now it is the first elevated park in the americas and the second in the world. The first project to use abandoned railtracks as a base to the contruction of a park was the Promenade Plantée, which crosses through Paris and exists since the 90’s.

The american High Line has another diferential, the first people that thought about giving it a makeover were the inhabitants of the neighborhood, which were tired of living with that abandoned space and founded the Friends of the High Line association. Soon after that, they presented a rennovation project and finally, gathered the support from the city hall. In 2003, it was launched a competition for designing the new High Line, which attracted more than 700 teams from over 36 different countries.

With the approved project in hands and all legal procedures well on their way, the rennovation of the first part of the High Line started in 2006. The project keeps being build, because only the first section is finished and opened to the public.

But the results have already been very surprising, so much that the Sundance Channel has created a series of micro documentaries online about the initiative, which are worth checking out.

Supported by the High Line’s success, other cities are also trying to do similar reconstructions, like Chicago with their Bloomingdale Trail, Philadelphia with the Reading Viaduct Project and Vienna with the Urbion, always counting with the support of locals to help their progress.