BY ZACH MORTICE
Susan Chin of the Design Trust for Public Space pushes to open new layers of cities.
FROM THE FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
In 2002, the Design Trust for Public Space published Reclaiming the High Line, a critical voice of support that helped jump-start the growing momentum to preserve that rusting hulk of a rail bed in Lower Manhattan. Now a city- and pedestrian-scaled outdoor art walk and landscape, the High Line is likely the most influential urban infrastructure renovation of the past 30 years. In another 30 years, it will probably still be.
But what if the High Line weren?t a spectacular one-off that left cities from coast to coast scrambling to replicate it" What if what the High Line is, and how it came about, could be codified and planned as easily as train track rails or the concrete columns hoisting up miles of elevated freeway" The Design Trust thinks it could be. For the past several years, the organization has been researching ways to improve the public space in, around, and especially beneath actively used elevated transit infrastructure. Its report, Under the Elevated: Reclaiming Space, Connecting Communities provides a tool set to understand the basic types of elevated transit infrastructure, and offers numerous case studies on how these places can be made more inviting, multifunctional, and sustainable. Most important, it addresses the ways these renovations can be supported by the municipal bureaucracies ...