Parks For Profit Selling Nature In The City

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and community benefits. Yet there are clear economic motives as well—successful parks have helped generate billions of dollars of city tax revenues and real estate development. Kevin Loughran explores the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago, and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston to offer a critical perspective on the rise of the postindustrial park. He reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals. As urban economies have become restructured around finance, real estate, tourism, and cultural consumption, parks serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investment. Tracing changing ideas about cities and nature and underscoring the centrality of race and class, Loughran argues that postindustrial parks aestheticize past disinvestment while serving as green engines of gentrification. A wide-ranging investigation of the political, cultural, and economic forces shaping park development, Parks for Profit reveals the social inequalities at the heart of today’s new urban landscape.

Kevin Loughran explores the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago, and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston to offer a critical perspective on the rise of the postindustrial park. He reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals.

Catie Marron’s City Parks captures the spirit and beauty of eighteen of the world’s most-loved city parks. Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Candice Bergen, Colm Tóibín, Nicole Krauss, Jan Morris, and a dozen other remarkable contributors reflect on a particular park that holds special meaning for them. Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of first love in the Presidio; André Aciman muses on time’s fleeting nature and the changing face of New York viewed from the High Line; Pico Iyer explores hidden places and privacy in Kyoto; Jonathan Alter takes readers from the 1968 race riots to Obama’s 2008 victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park; Simon Winchester invites us along on his adventures in the Maidan; and Bill Clinton writes of his affection for Dumbarton Oaks. Oberto Gili’s color and black-and-white photographs unify the writers’ unique and personal voices. Taken around the world over the course of a year, in every season, his pictures capture the inherent mood of each place. Fusing images and text, City Parks is an extraordinary and unique project: through personal reflection and intimate detail it taps into collective memory and our sense of time’s passage.

Publisher description

Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed. Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place. This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences.

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this book illustrates how and why cities are comprised by a mosaic of vulnerable human and ecological communities. Case studies ranging across various international settings reveal how 'urban vulnerabilities' is an effective metaphor and analytic lens for advancing political ecological theories on the relationships between cities, nature and development. Contributions expand upon conceptions of vulnerability as a static condition and instead present vulnerability as a phenomenon that is produced through complex and contentious planning histories, and which may, in turn, be politicized, exploited and-in some instances-contested. Expanding upon snapshot vulnerability assessments, this volume articulates vulnerability as a process that is marked by the accumulation of risk over time and the transference of risk across space and populations. Moving beyond notions of vulnerability as a singular, case studies demonstrate that social and ecological vulnerabilities are deeply integrated and, as such, are irreducible to one or the other. This volume also highlights how the production of vulnerabilities is frequently achieved through integrated and mutually reinforcing economic development and environmentally driven agendas. This collection thus suggests that vulnerability-and also forms of resilience-are implicated in efforts to plan for and manage sustainable cities. This book provides timely and provocative perspectives on a wide range of urban issues including: park management, gentrification, suburban expansion, sustainability planning, local organic food systems, hazards management, climate change activism and north-south flows of urban environmental externalities. Collectively, these works reveal the complexities of urban vulnerabilities-related to scalar interactions, accumulation and transfer of risk, politicization and governance, and capacity for resistance-and in doing so, provide readers with coherent, robust and well-theorized analysis of the politics and production of urban vulnerabilities.