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Imbricated Spaces: The High Line, Urban Parks, and the Cultural Meaning of City
and Nature

Article in Sociological Theory · December 2016

DOI: 10.1177/0735275116679192

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 IMBRICATED SPACES

Citation: Loughran, Kevin. “Imbricated Spaces: The High Line, Urban Parks, and the Cultural
Meaning of City and Nature.” Sociological Theory 34(4): 311-34.

Imbricated Spaces:
The High Line, Urban Parks, and the Cultural Meaning of City and Nature

Kevin Loughran, Northwestern University

Abstract:

This paper explores how the socio-spatial relationship between cities and nature is
changing under the cultural conditions of the twenty-first century. I argue that
contemporary urban parks such as New York’s High Line, along with less
cultivated sites of city-nature intersections such as vacant lots, represent
variations of an emergent type of social space, which I term “imbricated spaces.”
Imbricated spaces present “city” and “nature” as active agents in their creation
through the decay of the built environment and the growth of the natural
environment. The transformation of city-nature imbrications into culturally valued
spaces, whether through architectural intervention, artistic representation, or
phenomenological experience, reflects that such spaces not only have wide
resonance, but their growing presence on the urban landscape is correlated with a
broader recognition of how nonhuman agency – in particular, climate change and
industrial decay – is shaping the social spaces of contemporary cities.

City-nature imbrications are everywhere. Cracks in sidewalks provide room for weeds;

vacant lots and abandoned buildings offer refuge for grasses, flowers, even trees; new public

parks like New York’s High Line incorporate seemingly wild nature with picturesque urban

vistas. Through photographs or meditative strolls among the ruins of the industrial city, many

contemporary urbanites celebrate the harmony of built and natural environments. This

phenomenon reflects an emergent, highly influential understanding of the socio-spatial

relationship between city and nature. Whereas landscape designers and social theorists of

previous eras saw “city” and “nature” as binary opposites, many contemporary cultural

producers and receivers see the two abstractions as spatially and socially linked.

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Where city ends and nature begins is of course a social construction. The built

environment is made from materials that were once earth; though a paved street may symbolize

society’s domination of the natural world, cracks in the concrete reveal that human intervention

is far from the last word. But for all the varieties of ways that city and nature have intersected,

they have long been accorded very different cultural meanings. Historically these two concepts

have been tightly bounded, both spatially and symbolically: Central Park’s tree-lined, walled

perimeter kept the bustle of nineteenth-century Manhattan at bay; Georg Simmel ([1903] 2002)

influentially argued that urban conditions were transforming the “natural” rhythms of human

psychology; Romantic landscape painters like J. M. W. Turner contrasted nature’s Burkean

“sublime” with the banality of the built environment.

But contemporary interventions in built and natural environments suggest that these sharp

distinctions have, if not completely fallen, become increasingly blurred. In this paper, I explore

contemporary socio-spatial intersections of city and nature and develop the concept of

“imbricated space” to understand linked representations of “urban” and “natural” forms.

Imbricated spaces are social spaces that aesthetically unite representations of agentic “city” and

representations of agentic “nature.” Imbricated spaces are one example of broader city-nature

hybridity, which has ontological, cultural, and spatial implications (Wachsmuth 2012, 2014;

Angelo 2016). “Imbrication” suggests the blending or layering of multiple components, which in

spaces like the High Line manifests as an interweaving of built and natural materials. In these

spaces, “nature” is represented as insurgent – claiming spaces that humans had once conquered.

“City” is represented as decayed – through the rusting and rotting of the built environment.

Imbricated spaces are distinct from most sites of urban nature, such as urban parks, which

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historically have been purported to offer pastoral refuge from city life – removal, rather than

immersion (Cranz 1982).

I examine the “imbricated space” concept through the case study of New York’s High

Line, an elevated industrial railway that twice transformed into an imbricated space of urban

vistas, rusted steel, and wild grasses – first by the forces of nature and the decaying built

environment; second by architects who replicated the original hybridity in transforming the space

into a public park. By examining the design ideologies of the park’s cultural producers, I

demonstrate the aesthetic and phenomenological appeal of imbricated city and nature and

indicate how these cultural images have been institutionalized through the production of new

public spaces. But far from specific to urban parks, this paper theorizes the emergence of city-

nature hybridity on a cultural level and considers how an understanding of its cultural and

aesthetic dimensions offers a lens into broader intersections between the natural and the social.

I. PERSPECTIVES ON “NATURE” AND “CITY”

In early sociological theory, scholars such as Simmel ([1903] 2002), Du Bois (1899),

Park and Burgess (1925), and Tönnies ([1887] 1940) conceived “the city” as the space and

symbol of modernity, where traditional communal affiliations were broken and social ties were

reformulated under industrial capitalism and the rise of nation-states. Generally, these theorists

considered pre-urban social life rooted in the rhythms of the natural world. Underlying early

social scientists’ arguments were assumptions about the role of the natural environment in

shaping human society. Although some recognized “nature” as socially constructed (Foster 1999,

2000), it was widely viewed as the antithesis of “the city” and “modernity.” The separation of

these terms and all that each was understood to symbolize is outlined in Table 1.

[Table 1 about here]

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In recent decades, social scientists have more extensively theorized the ways that nature

is socially constructed (Latour 1993; Cronon 1991; Jerolmack 2012). Breaking with the

essentialist view of nature held by many early theorists, scholars have illustrated how groups

construct ideas about nature (Marx 1964; Williams 1973; Agrawal 2005) and reproduce nature

through institutions, like zoos (Grazian 2012), and social practices, such as mushroom collecting

(Fine 1998) and pigeon handling (Jerolmack 2007). Urbanists have reconsidered the role of

nature in the metropolis (Bennett and Teague 1999; Heynen et al. 2006; Wachsmuth 2012).

Many have taken an historical view to show how nineteenth-century planners designed public

parks, parkways, and other “natural” elements to shape social practices and public health

outcomes (Schuyler 1986; Cronon 1991; Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992; Rawson 2010). A

growing body of literature considers the social underpinnings of cities in ecological crisis,

illustrating how urban growth in ecologically fragile areas, such as the American West, has had

wide-ranging effects on environmental sustainability and social inequality (Davis 1998; Walker

2011; Colten 2006). In a related vein, actor-network theorists have pushed social scientists to

consider nature an autonomous “nonhuman” actor (Latour 1993; Murdoch 1996). Some scholars

have gone even further, arguing that human agency has profoundly shaped nature itself, creating

a new geologic era known as the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Clark

2014). These ideas are summarized in Table 2.

[Table 2 about here]

Social scientists have often considered the hybrid union of city and nature on an

infrastructural level as “urban metabolism”: the networked flows of natural materials through

cities that carry social and political implications (Heynen et al. 2006). Scholars like Cronon

(1991), Gandy (2002), and Swyngedouw (2006) have documented how hydrologic systems,

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waste management, and energy supplies are imbued with power relations – “the city in a glass of

water” (Swyngedouw 2006: 27). The urban metabolism approach offers a lens into the ways that

the control of natural resources by city governments, corporations, and landowners reproduces

inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender through differential access to clean water,

green spaces, and other resources (Taylor 1999; Wolch, Wilson, and Fehrenbach 2005). In a

similar vein, scholars have traced political conflicts over “nature” within cities, as Martinez

(2010) illustrates in her study of immigrant activists and community gardens and Greenberg

(2013) examines in her analysis of competing visions of urban “sustainability.” More broadly,

scholars from urban political ecology and critical urban theory have indicated how spatially

delimiting “city” from its various analytical oppositions (e.g., nature, suburbs) has become

problematic given the global expansion of urban infrastructure and capital flows in a process

termed “planetary urbanization” (Brenner 2014; Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015; see also Angelo

2016; Tsing 2015).

Urban parks represent the preeminent site of nature-making within cities. With culturally

and politically important parks developing in Western cities during rapid nineteenth-century

urbanization, urban parks – particularly their pastoral, picturesque variants – have long been

wrapped in the same sacred guise as “nature” more generally. Representing social ideals like

democracy, beauty, public health, and spirituality, while also being bound up in capitalist land-

use and social control efforts (Taylor 1999; Gandy 2002), parks are a key site for understanding

the social and spatial demarcation between nature and city.

The creation of urban parks, as an act of cultural production, emplaces the socially

constructed relationship between “city” and “nature” into physical form. Like other arenas of

cultural production, urban parks are produced by assemblages of actors operating within existing

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political-economic systems, cultural conditions, and institutional frameworks, with differential

access to the resources required for creation (Griswold 1987). Like other cultural objects, urban

parks are produced within a “dualist structure” (Bourdieu [1992] 1996: 113) of inversely related

economic and symbolic systems, wherein the symbolic value of “pure” nature can “turn[] upside

down” (Bourdieu [1992] 1996: 81) the economic considerations that dictate land-use decisions.

In this regard, the production of urban parks most resembles the field of architecture, which

Jameson (1989: 5) notes is the art form “closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in

the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.” Like

buildings (Gieryn 2002), parks spatially structure human activity in ways that other cultural

objects do not. Parks typically require much political and economic capital to build and maintain;

though the act of park creation seemingly “take[s] land out of the market economy and

‘decommodif[ies]’ it” (Zukin 2010: 211), the development of parkland nevertheless structures

the flows of capital as part of the “spatial rationalization of production, circulation, and

consumption” (Harvey 1990: 232); powerful actors will necessarily be invested in the locational,

financial, and aesthetic qualities of a new park project, thus influencing the production process

(Author citation deleted). Due to their public quality, parks depart from buildings in that their

constituency is the broader “public,” however defined, rather than a narrower set of interests. For

these reasons, the cultural production of nature through urban parks intersects directly with the

power structure of a given city (Gandy 2002).

II. THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CITY-NATURE IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Many scholars have charted the changing social meaning of city and nature as expressed

through the creation of urban parks and other cultural objects. Initial efforts at park creation in

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Western cities mirrored early sociologists’ ontological separation of “city” and “nature”: urban

parks were to be a sanctuary, an oasis of greenery amidst the purportedly deleterious conditions

of the industrial city. Strongly influenced by aesthetic philosophers such as Edmund Burke

([1756] 1990) and William Gilpin (1792), the creation of an idealized form of nature in the

paintings of the Hudson River School and the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and Henry

David Thoreau provided a resonant cultural image; the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted and

Andrew Jackson Downing laid this image down in spatial form: a pastoral understanding of

nature as spatially and spiritually distinct from urban modernity (Marx 1964; Williams 1973;

Buell 1995).

The form of “nature” constructed through picturesque aesthetics was a particular one: the

lush valleys, rocky fields, and rough hills found in Britain, New England, and along the

American “frontier” – thereby valorizing the natural landscapes found within a few hundred

miles of the cultural and economic capitals of the Anglo-Saxon world. Of course, these natural

landscapes did not represent the totality of “nature”; but given the power of these

representations, the picturesque aesthetic vision of nature became the preeminent cultural image

in Europe and the United States by the late nineteenth century (Schuyler 1986; Rybczynski

1999).

The influence of picturesque aesthetics on urban planners and landscape architects (both

nascent occupations of the nineteenth-century city) led these cultural producers to attempt to

sharply divide “urban” spaces from the spaces of “nature” represented by parks. As cities like

New York, Atlanta, and Chicago were still expanding outward into proximate countryside

through the beginning of the twentieth century, public acquisition of the land that became parks

like Central, Piedmont, and Jackson was politically and economically feasible. The relatively

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large size of these nineteenth-century spaces enabled landscape architects to emphasize

separation from urban life. Designers of pastoral spaces introduced elements such as tree-lined

perimeters, truncated vistas, and less manicured spaces that highlighted rocky outcroppings and

waterfalls rather than formal gardens and fountains (see Figure 1) in order to connect urbanized

nature to the images of vast wilderness valorized by picturesque aesthetics. Heavily landscaped

with “air purifying” trees, along with undulating topography and “natural”-looking bodies of

water, parks designed by landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Andrew Jackson

Downing, Calvert Vaux, and Horace Cleveland physically separated the spaces of parks from

views of the built environment. Certainly, parks like Central Park did not embody the totality of

urban parks or the presence of nature in the city – consider urban waterfronts (Bluestone 1987)

or the spaces of urban livestock (MacLachlan 2007) – nor did cultural receivers always see such

a sharp separation between city and nature (Warner 1987): this city-nature demarcation, was,

after all, a socially constructed fiction. However, such spaces did represent the primary symbolic

spaces of nature within urban areas – the spaces with influential cultural and economic power;

the spaces built by nineteenth-century growth machines and valorized by nineteenth-century

elites; the spaces that shaped social understandings of city and nature for many decades.

[Figure 1 about here]

Nineteenth-Century Parks, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the City-Nature Binary

It is worth considering nineteenth-century parks in more detail to better illustrate how the

city-nature binary was spatialized, in order to draw a contrast between nineteenth-century parks

and contemporary hybrid spaces. As mentioned, Central Park’s “architect-in-chief,” Frederick

Law Olmsted, along with his design partner, Calvert Vaux, were important figures in nineteenth-

century landscape design. Given Olmsted’s far-reaching impact on Western urbanism – as the

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designer of Chicago’s Washington and Jackson Parks, Boston’s Back Bay Fens, Montreal’s

Mont Royal, and many other “crown jewels” of North American cities – his understanding of

“cities,” “nature,” and their relationship not only reflected broader cultural ideologies, but shaped

them through the creation of many urban parks. As a prolific writer about urbanism, landscape

architecture, and nature more broadly, Olmsted’s numerous treatises provide an excellent site to

examine the “intentions” (Griswold 1987: 5-10) underlying the cultural production of nineteenth-

century green spaces and the city-nature binary. In what follows, I analyze key excerpts from

Olmsted’s various writings; although the selections date from various points across his long

career, each of the ideas he expresses – about picturesque aesthetics, socio-spatial practices, and

the city-nature relationship – can be found in Central Park along with many of his other projects.

Olmsted on Picturesque Aesthetics

Olmsted’s belief in picturesque aesthetic philosophy deeply shaped his approach to

landscape design. He saw a universal impulse in “the civilization of our time” to find beauty in

the sorts of natural phenomena that were valorized by Gilpin and Burke. For Olmsted, these

cultural tastes were a sign of “a healthy change in the tone of the human heart” ([1886] 2010),

and it was the duty of landscape architects to represent these tastes in public parks:

The civilization of our time … finds a greater pleasure in rivers than in canals; it enjoys
the sea, it enjoy the distinctive qualities of mountains, crags, rocks; it is pleasantly
affected by all that in natural scenery which is indefinite, blending, evasive. (Olmsted
[1886] 2010: 122-3)

In his 1868 address to the Prospect Park Scientific Association, Olmsted ([1868] 2010)

explained his definition of a “park.” Picturesque aesthetic conditions were critical; in particular,

Olmsted emphasized the importance of limiting park users’ range of vision by using “natural”

elements to frame particular vistas. Following Burke, Olmsted was a proponent of introducing

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elements of “the sublime” into landscapes – moments that evoke terror, but safely, “at certain

distances” (Burke [1756] 2001: 60).

In his vision of picturesque aesthetics, Olmsted believed that natural landscapes were

meant to be appreciated in the complete absence of buildings. As Rybczynski (1999) documents,

he and Vaux clashed with the New York city government over the placement of architectural

works in Central Park (168). In an essay that appeared in The Garden magazine in 1876,

Olmsted wrote:

The objection, then, to monumental and architectural objects in works of landscape

gardening is this, that, as a rule, they are not adapted to contribute to any concerted effect,
but are likely to demand attention to themselves in particular, distracting the mind from
the contemplation of the landscape as such, and disturbing its suggestions to the
imagination. (Olmsted [1876] 2010: 141)

Olmsted on Cities and Nature

A second consideration in Olmsted’s role in the development of nineteenth-century parks

was how he understood the relationship between cities and nature. Like other nineteenth-century

urban planners (Peterson 1979), Olmsted considered dense urban spaces “unhealthy” and saw

“nature” – in the form of urban parks – “as means of counteracting the evils of town life”

(Olmsted [1870] 2010: 225).1

Among American cities, Olmsted held that New York was particularly distasteful from

an aesthetic and a political standpoint, commenting that “Next to the direct results of a slipshod,

temporizing government of amateurs, the great disadvantage under which New York labors is

one growing out of the senseless manner in which its streets have been laid out” (Olmsted [1879]

2010: 114). Olmsted was a critic of rectilinear grids in general – considering Manhattan, along

with Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Chicago to be “laid out in the unhappy way” (Olmsted [1870]

2010: 233). Such linearity, he held, disrupted the more pastoral streetscapes that were possible

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under less angular conditions. Parks like Central Park, then, beyond their roles as “fine art” and

public space, were to serve as correctives to the banality of the grid.

Olmsted often invoked scientific language to argue that urban parks had a biotic, in

addition to a social, importance. In his treatise “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,”

Olmsted drew connections between modern urban conditions and disease, and argued that parks

served a public health function in more explicit terms:

Air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage. Foliage also acts mechanically to purify the air
by screening it. Opportunity and inducement to escape at frequent intervals from the
confined and vitiated air of the commercial quarter, and to supply the lungs with air
screened and purified by trees, and recently acted upon by sunlight, together with the
opportunity and inducement to escape from conditions requiring vigilance, wariness, and
activity toward other men—if these could be supplied economically, our problem would
be solved. (Olmsted [1870] 2010: 220-1)

In addition to public health considerations, Olmsted was also concerned with the effects

of urban life on city dwellers’ collective psychology. In a passage that to an extent prefigures

Georg Simmel’s identification of the “blasé metropolitan attitude” in “The Metropolis and

Mental Life” ([1903] 2002), Olmsted suggested that the adverse effects of urban life could be

ameliorated through regular contact with nature:

[C]onsider that whenever we walk through the denser part of a town, to merely avoid
collision with those we meet and pass upon the sidewalks, we have constantly to watch,
to foresee, and to guard against their movements. This involves a consideration of their
intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so much for their
benefit as our own. Our minds are thus brought into close dealings with other minds
without any friendly flowing toward them, but rather a drawing from them. (Olmsted
[1870] 2010: 215-6)

These excerpts from Olmsted’s numerous writings reveal his cultural approach to the

relationship between city and nature. Like other nineteenth-century landscape architects,

Olmsted was deeply influenced by picturesque aesthetic philosophy and saw his parks as “fine

arts” that would encourage contemplation and pastoral recreation. He intended that picturesque

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parks, with their myriad topographical changes and pastoral beauty, would provide comforting

and awe-inspiring places for weary urbanites. Also motivated by the biotic concerns that would

later undergird the City Beautiful movement, Olmsted hoped that his parks’ substantial flora

would act to “disinfect” urban air ([1870] 2010: 220) and guard against public health crises.

Olmsted saw cities as potentially unhealthy places and preferred the picturesque beauty of the

New England countryside and “the advantages of civilization” ([1870] 2010: 213) that he found

in the suburbs. For Olmsted and his contemporaries, nineteenth-century picturesque parks

represented efforts to separate the spaces of “nature” from urban spaces – enabling city residents

to appreciate natural environments in a distinctive, partitioned space.

III. THE EMERGENCE OF CITY-NATURE HYBRIDITY

Despite the efforts of Olmsted and his peers, spatial manifestations of the city-nature

binary as expressed in nineteenth-century urban parks were ultimately an illusion. The aesthetic

ideal of complete separation between city and nature, though culturally powerful, did not fully

exist in the real world – there was always hybridity in urban parks. The emergence of hybrid

city-nature spaces as an archetype, however, did not occur for over a century after the

construction of Central Park and other picturesque spaces. The question of how ideal park form

and broader understandings of the city-nature relationship transformed between the nineteenth

century and the present therefore requires consideration. Here I offer some provisional thoughts

on the historical trajectories of city-nature relations and how the recent cultural convergence of

built and natural forms has materialized in urban parks. What follows is not a comprehensive

analysis of landscape architectural trends or an empirical documentation of how the idealized

city-nature relationship transformed from a binary to a hybrid. Rather, this overview of certain

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relevant factors is intended as a starting point for future sociological investigations by proposing

a theoretical bridge between nineteenth-century picturesque parks and contemporary imbricated

spaces.

As scholars have argued, changing social conditions of twentieth-century cities prompted

new uses of parks and new measures of socio-spatial control (Cranz 1982; Gandy 2002). The

long transformation in the use of public parks from sites of elite or quasi-elite leisure to more

populist, recreation-focused spaces described by scholars like Cranz (1982) and Rosenzweig and

Blackmar (1992) corresponded with changes in the design of both new parks and existing urban

green spaces – with further reverberations for the meaning of city and nature. The upward

growth of the built environment over the first half of the twentieth century eventually rendered

tree-lined perimeters unable to visually separate nature from city as oak trees could not keep

pace with steel curtain walls. Many nineteenth-century green spaces, such as Central Park’s

Sheep Meadow, became overshadowed by skyscrapers, thus sharply modifying the pastoral

vistas that designers like Olmsted had in mind (see Figure 2). Additional changes were wrought

by twentieth-century builders like Robert Moses, who deracinated swaths of nineteenth-century

green spaces, placing more egalitarian, but also more ordered, forms of recreation – baseball

fields, basketball courts, swimming pools – in their place (Madden 2010).

[Figure 2 about here]

Paralleling changes in the design and use of existing urban parks, metropolitan-level

spatial and demographic changes further altered the cultural meaning of city and nature in the

twentieth century, particularly after World War II. Expanding suburbanization in the United

States shifted the white middle class’s purview of nature from urban parks to suburban backyards

(Jackson 1985; Duncan and Duncan 2004). Disinvestment in city centers by governments and

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corporations wrought a long decline in the economic fortunes of older “rust belt” areas (Sugrue

1996). As public parks are particularly visible manifestations of governmental investment

(Mitchell 1995), their physical decline was a powerful image of urban decay; by the 1970s and

80s, the symbolic meaning of urban parks was increasingly linked to the symbolic meaning of

cities themselves (Davis 1990; Flusty 1994). Many parks came to lack Jane Jacobs’s (1961)

“eyes on the street” – the community-level surveillance considered necessary components of

safe, usable public spaces (Shepard and Smithsimon 2011). Coupled with sensationalist news

coverage of park-based crimes like the 1989 Central Park jogger case, urban parks became

implicated in racialized narratives of urban crime and disorder: indeed, from the standpoint of

the suburbanite or tourist, parks were seen as perhaps the most “unsafe” spaces within an “out-

of-control” urban context (Greenberg 2008; Vitale 2009).

But parks were not the only spaces where definitions of city and nature were converging.

Another product of disinvestment and depopulation was the proliferation of abandoned

buildings, vacant lots, and disused infrastructure. As these assorted sites lost their original social

functions, in some cases they were overtaken by nature – wild plants that grew within the ruins

of the industrial built environment. In many circumstances, the aesthetics of decline were seen as

evidence of an economic and social crisis (Sugrue 1996; Greenberg 2008). In other cases, urban

decay and city-nature hybridity were bound up in “the artistic mode of production” associated

with the gentrification of former industrial districts (Zukin 1982: 176). Cultural desires for

“authentic” urban places (Brown-Saracino 2009; Osman 2011) brought overgrown parking lots,

concrete canals, abandoned piers, and unused railways into middle-class gentrifiers’

aestheticization of former industrial landscapes. Though nature’s encroachment of urban spaces

was long a marker of decline, the gentrification of postindustrial neighborhoods has modified the

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symbolic value of these city-nature intersections as an appreciation for the natural landscapes of

industrial ruin has emerged among new residents of these spaces. The popularity of “ruin porn,”

– the photographic portrayal of such sites as contemplative and beautiful – is a primary example

of the resonance of such representations (Millington 2013). These imbricated representations, of

course, require a particular standpoint to appreciate, not unlike the cultural reading of “rubble” as

“ruin” (Gordillo 2014).

Images of the “industrial picturesque” (Herrington 2006) have become institutionalized

through the construction of new public parks, such as New York’s High Line, that emplace city-

nature imbrications in physical form. Just as nineteenth-century planners used landscape

architecture to spatially construct the classical picturesque and the city-nature binary,

contemporary cultural producers are mirroring these efforts in parks that highlight elements of

decayed “city” and insurgent “nature.” The cultural power of these representations is reflected in

the economic capital invested – $188 million and counting for the High Line2 – and the far-flung

admiration: the rush to build copycat High Lines in Chicago, Philadelphia, Mexico City, and

many other places. In what follows, I examine the design ideology behind the construction of the

New York version to illustrate how cultural producers actively create city-nature hybridity.

IV. THE HIGH LINE, CITY-NATURE HYBRIDITY, AND IMBRICATED SPACES

New York’s High Line, a public park opened in 2009 atop an old elevated railway, serves

as a useful case of city-nature imbrication. Because the park was actually built as a reproduction

of the wild flora that grew within the disused rail bed, its development reveals the ideological

underpinnings of city-nature hybridity more broadly. Painstaking efforts by the park’s architects

to remake the appearance of agentic built and natural environments illustrates such spaces’

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aesthetic and phenomenological appeal and demonstrates how these cultural images have been

institutionalized through the production of new public spaces that bring these representations into

wider circulation and consumption (Collins 2004).

The High Line was originally an elevated industrial rail line serving the lower west side

of Manhattan that, like much of that part of the city, declined with the loss of manufacturing

businesses after 1970. In the intervening years between its closure in 1980 and its redevelopment

in the 2000s, the unused rail bed became home to grasses and flowers, creating an imbricated

space of urban infrastructure, city vistas, and wild flora. This green landscape was fully

unintended by humans – a product of the absence of the industrial and human activity that had

previously taken place. The deep rail bed and the Hudson River’s breezes provided a hospitable

context for wild plants to blossom. This expression of the natural environment’s agency was

central to the site’s appeal once people discovered it in the 1980s (Gottlieb 1984), and indeed,

representing this agency became the centerpiece of the architectural design strategy once the

High Line was redeveloped as a public park (Millington 2015).

Efforts to repurpose the High Line dated to the 1980s, but only became successful when

the city government and local property owners made plans to demolish the structure, prompting

an organized response by well-connected, culturally minded local residents (Author citation

deleted). Publicizing their efforts in part through photographs of the High Line that conveyed the

space’s distinctive city-nature imbrication, the Friends of the High Line – the nonprofit group

that was founded to save the space – built financial, political, and cultural support for the project,

helping the idea of an elevated park take hold in the public imagination. In the early 2000s, a

new mayoral administration, coupled with the super-gentrification (Lees 2003) of the

Meatpacking District and West Chelsea, changed the complexion of the debate. Mayor Michael

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Bloomberg envisioned a new High Line as a complement to the redevelopment of the West Side

Yards in Midtown, where plans for a new stadium were in place as part of the city’s 2012

Summer Olympics bid (Author citation deleted). The combination of political support and the

cultural and economic possibilities of a redeveloped far west side made the park proposal a

reality by 2009 (Halle and Tiso 2014).

As I indicate in the following sections, the intentions behind the design and development

of the “new” High Line reveal the emergent ideology of imbricated city and nature more

generally. To a considerable extent, this ideology centers on the notion of nonhuman agency

(Latour 2005). At the broader level of urban-environmental politics, the recognition of climatic

influence on human society is reflected in the emergence of “green” planning initiatives and

other policy prescriptions (Greenberg 2013; Gotham and Greenberg 2014). More particularly at

the level of imbricated spaces, the High Line case makes clear that the appearance of the natural

environment’s agency is central to their appeal, regardless of “who” is actually the active agent

behind their creation. In contradistinction to the manicured plants of traditional public parks,

flora in imbricated spaces must be deemed “authentic” by cultural receivers – i.e., that “nature”

had a genuine hand in creating the space – even when, as in the case of the redeveloped High

Line, such greenery is carefully cultivated by people. Relatedly, the appearance of the built

environment’s agency is also central. Although the built environment is by definition built by

human action, the deterioration of buildings and infrastructure suggests a process of nonhuman

agency that likewise contributes to the aesthetic appeal of imbricated spaces. In imbricated

spaces, as in other spaces where industrial decline has been aestheticized (Zukin 1982), blighted

buildings present as art objects (Herrington 2006; Gordillo 2014). In spaces like the High Line,

the real-or-imagined agency of built and natural environments affirms for cultural receivers that

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 IMBRICATED SPACES

city-nature hybridity is a process existing outside of human intervention and suggests that city

and nature can be the creators of an aesthetically interesting space.

The High Line’s Designers as Producers of Urban Nature

Broadly conceived, the High Line’s design team included two architectural firms, a

landscape designer, governmental actors, and the principals of the Friends of the High Line, the

non-profit group that spurred the creation of the park. The architectural firms – James Corner

Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro – represented something of underdogs in the

design process, winning over established firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and designers

like Michael Van Valkenburgh, who had been commissioned for several other new parks in New

York City at the time (David and Hammond 2011: 73-8). At the time of selection, James Corner

was an architectural professor known for his efforts to bridge traditional landscape architecture

and the tenets of New Urbanism. His partners in the High Line design, Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio,

and Charles Renfro, had been producing high-concept abstract architecture – in the form of

installations and pop-up buildings – since the 1970s, but had relatively few building credits to

their name (though the firm had just won the commission to redesign New York’s Lincoln

Center prior to winning the High Line competition). The team’s landscape designer, Piet Oudolf,

was a well-known horticulturalist considered one of the foremost experts on cultivating wild-

looking grasses (Stuart-Smith 2013).

Actors from the city government and the Friends of the High Line were involved in the

design process in important ways. Although these individuals had little, if any, experience in

park design, their ideas about the High Line’s aesthetics, its relationship to the city, and the sorts

of socio-spatial practices the park should support were borne out not only through the selection

of the design team, but by providing input throughout the design process (David and Hammond

18
 IMBRICATED SPACES

2011). These actors included Josh David and Robert Hammond, Chelsea residents who formed

the Friends of the High Line to mobilize against the Giuliani administration’s demolition plans

(Author citation deleted). As their non-profit group gained financial and political support over

the subsequent decade, additional actors became decision makers in the design process. These

individuals included city planning chair Amanda Burden, parks commissioner Adrian Benepe,

and deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff. Although these city-based actors were ultimately the clients of

the actual architects, their vision for the High Line influenced aspects of the park’s design.

Given the large number of individuals involved in designing the High Line, it is

impossible to create a singular vision of urban nature that all actors held in consensus. However,

the various writings and interviews of the key participants reveal a shared conception of

aesthetics and the city-nature relationship. In the following sections, I draw from statements by

each of these actors to illustrate the common view of imbricated city and nature that was held by

the design team.

The High Line’s Designers on the Aesthetics of City and Nature

Before the High Line was a celebrated park, it was an unused urban railway teeming with

wild grasses and flowers. This nexus of the built environment and the natural world created a

space for urban adventurers to make an illegal journey from Manhattan to what appeared to be,

as a co-founder of the Friends of the High Line put it, “another world” (David and Hammond

2011: 12). For the co-founders of the Friends of the High Line, the unique phenomenological

experience of imbricated city and nature was the driving inspiration for the eventual park. As co-

founder Robert Hammond wrote of his first visit to the “old” High Line,

You walked out [onto the High Line] and you were on train tracks that were covered in
wildflowers. I don’t know what I had expected. Maybe just gravel, stone ballast, and
tracks—more of a ruin. … I just didn’t expect wildflowers. This was not a few blades of

19
 IMBRICATED SPACES

grass growing up through gravel. The wildflowers and plants had taken over. We had to
wade through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace. It was another world, right in the middle of
Manhattan. (David and Hammond 2011: 12; emphasis added)

Speaking to the idea of the “industrial picturesque” (Herrington 2006) – specifically, the ways

that the aesthetic re-use of technological ruins evokes their former glory – Friends of the High

Line co-founder Josh David wrote of his first time atop the High Line,

There was a powerful sense of the passing of time. You could see what the High Line
was built for, and feel that its moment had slipped away. All the buildings alongside it
were brick warehouses and factories with smokestacks and casement windows, like
buildings from a Hopper painting. (David and Hammond 2011: 12)

These quotations speak to the particular sensory experience that the High Line’s designers found

in the mix of built and natural environments. Although the vistas of the lower west side’s

industrial landscapes were part of the site’s allure, Hammond’s reflection indicates that the

unexpected presence of “nature” within the former industrial space – and especially the notion

that nature created the space (“the wildflowers and plants had taken over”) – was central to his

fascination with the High Line.

In transforming the “old” High Line into a park, the design team focused on re-creating

the appearance of agentic elements of city and nature that had made the original space so

compelling. The combined efforts of the park’s cultural producers thereby made a new

imbricated space through a direct act of cultural production. The logistics of creating a safe,

usable public space necessitated the removal of the High Line’s original rail beds and wild flora.

In their place, the park designers sought to reconstruct as many of the “old” elements as possible

– for example, by re-using pieces of the original rails for aesthetic effect and utilizing a rail-

inspired planked walkway – and cultivated “wild” plants, all in an attempt to keep the new space

in character with the past. These elements thereby suggested to park visitors the continued

20
 IMBRICATED SPACES

agency of insurgent nature and decayed city in shaping the space, despite the fact the park was a

space made by people.

Key to the exhibition of imbricated built and natural environments was the park’s

concrete planking system that defined the park’s walkable area. Aesthetically, these long, narrow

planks recalled the wooden planks of a railroad and enabled the park’s new natural elements to

commingle with the park’s built material (see Figure 3). Citing the influence of another

imbricated space, architect Ric Scofidio remarked:

Rather than pouring a hardscape or a macadam path, [we designed] a planking system
that could feather into the landscape. Actually we looked at concrete sidewalks, where
the concrete had been broken and the grass was forcing its way through, and there was
incredible tension between the green and the concrete. (Dunn and Piper 2012: 6.48-7.14)

[Figure 3 about here]

A second important aspect of the park’s design was the incorporation of plants that

mimicked the space’s previously existing nature. Landscape designer Piet Oudolf was celebrated

by the Friends of the High Line’s co-founders for his ability to cultivate wild-looking plants

(David and Hammond 2011: 77). Helping to differentiate the High Line’s natural aesthetics from

the ordinary grasses of typical urban parks and the ornateness of botanical gardens, the “wild”

grasses, flowers, and trees planted within the park suggested to park users that the appearance of

nature within this urban, built context was indeed agentic and “natural” (see Figure 4).

[Figure 4 about here]

Creating a “new” imbricated space on the High Line also required aspects of “the city” to

re-create the phenomenological experience of the old High Line. The visual union of city and

nature was done explicitly, as the park’s designers drew out elements of the High Line’s

industrial and built qualities in artful ways. At the “10th Avenue Square,” for example, part of the

structure was removed to provide park-goers with a glass-enclosed view to the street traffic

21
 IMBRICATED SPACES

below (see Figure 5). Such spaces created visual exchanges between park users and people in the

city; importantly, they also made mundane aspects of urban existence visible to people on the

High Line.

[Figure 5 about here]

These interactions with the city are central to the experience of the “new” High Line.

Bringing views of the city into a park would have been anathema to Olmsted and other

nineteenth-century park designers; in the twenty-first century, this design ideology reflects the

cultural convergence of city and nature and physically reproduces these ideas for park-goers to

contemplate. At the High Line’s “viewing spur” at 26th Street, the park’s architects designed a

metal frame to mimic a billboard that previously occupied the same space. This offered a focal

point for park users to look out into the city and vice versa. Architect Ric Scofidio explained:

There’s this wonderful moment … where there’s always been a billboard. In the
restoration process, everything was ripped down, and that history would be gone. But we
thought it would be nice to keep the memory of it, so at 26th Street we have that frame,
but it also becomes a frame back to the city. (Dunn and Piper 2012: 11.19-41)

Fellow architect Charles Renfro, speaking directly to the idea of representing the built

environment’s agency, added,

It’s not a one-way activity. … It’s a two-way activity. It’s always about a reciprocity.
And so the frame is focusing the people from inside looking out, but it’s also focusing the
people outside looking in. So while it might be confused with theater, it’s actually an
inversion, and it turns the city into an actor and the people into actors at the same time.
(Dunn and Piper 2012: 11.44-12.06)

The High Line’s Designers on Socio-Spatial Practices

In addition to designing these interactions between park users and the city beyond, the

High Line’s designers considered how people would move through the space. In designing the

long, linear space as a walking promenade, the park’s architects intended the High Line to be a

space of passive leisure – a venue for people to stroll, linger in certain areas, and have a view to

22
 IMBRICATED SPACES

the park’s greenery, to city streets below, to Midtown’s skyscrapers, and to other park users. This

suggests that within the cultural conditions of contemporary cities, the place of humans is

evolving vis-à-vis the city-nature convergence; spaces like the High Line are actively shaping the

new meaning of nature and city, as well as helping to construct a particular vision of the twenty-

first century urbanite: an individual who can understand the space and appreciate the imbrication.

On the question of the new park’s intended socio-spatial practices, Friends of the High

Line co-founder Josh David remarked:

In Italy there’s a traditional walk called the passeggiata. In small towns and big cities,
people come out in the early evening to do a leisurely, theatrical promenade through one
of the main streets or a central plaza. When we started working on the High Line, I held
in the back of my mind an image of the High Line as a place where something like the
Italian passeggiata could happen—a place where people would come to stroll just for the
sake of strolling, to be among their fellow citizens, to smile and flirt, to check out one
another’s outfits, to walk with parents after an early dinner, or to meet up for a date.
(David and Hammond 2011: 126; emphasis in original)

Speaking to a similar vision of passive leisure was landscape architect James Corner, who

remarked on the High Line’s “Section 2” (opened in 2011, two years after the first section

opened to the public):

Certain things we learned in Section 1 is just how people like to linger on the High Line.
That’s it’s not simply about strolling, but it’s about seating and just taking in the scene.
And so in Section 2 there was an attempt to allow for more seating, to create more nooks
and crannies where people can sit and relax and to try to create some settings where you
can actually theatricalize the relationship between the viewer and the viewed.
(Bloomberg TV 2011)

Lastly, beyond the scope of the park itself, the designers of the High Line held a vision of

the park’s broader significance vis-à-vis the contemporary city. Unlike earlier generations of

landscape architects, they did not see “nature” as something to be spatially separated from “the

city.” Rather, cities like New York were seen as communities with interesting histories and

contemporary environmental and recreational needs, which encouraged the re-use of former

23
 IMBRICATED SPACES

industrial spaces in the name of sustainability. As Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert

Hammond stated:

There’s not very many places in American cities or cities across the world to build new
parks. All of the spaces are mostly old industrial sites. And rather than just clearing them
out and starting anew and trying to recreate Central Park, you retain the industrial history,
at the same time bringing in a new green use. (Wolf 2009b: 1.35-53)

Speaking to these same ideas, James Corner commented on how the High Line fit within his

ideological approach toward cities and nature:

[T]he whole environmental agenda is something that landscape architects have been
trained in and have worked on for years. … Cities are beginning to invest in new parks,
new public spaces, new waterfronts, and the transformation of many of these
postindustrial inheritances from the 20th century. … With the shift from an industrial
economy in cities to a service economy, a lot of land is abandoned and derelict. No one
knows what to do with it. The High Line is a great example of making something new.
(Rhodes 2012: 1-2)

In sum, the cultural producers behind the redevelopment of the High Line intended to

accomplish several objectives through the creation of the park. Aesthetically, they sought to

recreate an imbricated space by maintaining the appearance of agentic city and agentic nature

even as the new High Line’s “natural” spaces were carefully constructed by landscape architects.

In designing the park’s intended socio-spatial practices, they sought to cultivate passive leisure

among park users and reorient people’s visual relationship to the city. Lastly, in terms of their

conception of the broader city-nature relationship, the designers intended that the High Line

would serve as a model for green interventions in contemporary cities. In achieving these things,

the park’s designers reproduced the imbrication of city and nature as both space and symbol.

Different in many respects from prior iterations of public parks, the cultural and economic power

of the High Line and its far-reaching influence speaks to the wide resonance of city-nature

hybridity.

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 IMBRICATED SPACES

V. DISCUSSION

The design ideology of the High Line’s cultural producers illustrates a key example of the

emergent city-nature relationship. Breaking from the dominant “binary” orientation, the creation

of the High Line reflects the rise of a “hybrid” understanding of how city and nature intersect,

where representations of agentic city and agentic nature coexist in “imbricated spaces.” This shift

in the cultural orientation toward city and nature is not only symbolic. Over the intervening 150

years between the first generation of modern urban parks and the redevelopment of the High

Line, both nature and cities changed in important material ways. In the United States, most cities

were long ago built to their politically defined limits (Jackson 1985). While some cities, like

Detroit and St. Louis, have experienced widespread “greening” through disinvestment as vacant

lots proliferate on the landscape, cities that have retained their downtown core of people and

capital, like New York, tend to have few open spaces for new parks. With greenfield

development limited to the exurban fringe or waterfront infill (in cases like Brooklyn Bridge

Park), city governments, planners, and citizens have tended to work within the spatial framework

of the existing built environment, utilizing outmoded industrial infrastructure to reimagine the

urban landscape.

These material changes to cities are connected to the bi-directional relationship between

nature and human society. In the age of the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007;

Clark 2014), an awareness of global warming and the socio-environmental consequences of mass

consumption and industrialization indicates the agency of nature in shaping human society and

has shifted the locus of nature-oriented social movements and governmental action from the

preservation of open spaces to the repurposing of urban infrastructure for environmentally

friendly purposes. The mobilization of groups such as the Young Lords in 1970s Spanish Harlem

25
 IMBRICATED SPACES

(Gandy 2002: ch. 4) and contemporary “green anarchist” organizations, along with less radical

movements like urban farming, bike sharing, and other “green” initiatives, have reoriented the

interaction of the natural and the social from wilderness to urban areas, further reinforcing the

idea that city and nature are interwoven, both culturally and metabolically.

While the case of the High Line indicates changes in the cultural orientation toward city

and nature, it also reveals important similarities between contemporary public spaces and prior

versions. Though early parks such as Central Park were intended to shelter urbanites from the

tumult of city life and the High Line was to transport visitors to a skyward industrial garden, the

cultural producers behind each sought to cultivate passive leisure and pastoral retreat. For

nineteenth-century planners like Frederick Law Olmsted, the picturesque represented a means to

frame “nature” for the audience. By using design to accentuate the “roughness” of things like

rocky outcroppings and waterfalls, Olmsted and his contemporaries presented cultural receivers

with an aestheticized image of the natural world. The design of the High Line, though not

oriented towards scenes of “first nature,” takes up many of these same themes. From the High

Line’s picturesque vistas, the rails, factories, and piers of Manhattan’s lower west side are

transformed from mundane industrial materials into culturally valued art objects (see Figure 6).

This transformation of cultural meaning through an imbricated space enables contemporary

urbanites to contemplate the industrial past and the place of humans and cities vis-à-vis the

natural world.

[Figure 6 about here]

The expression of the joint agency of built and natural environments embodied by both

the “old” High Line – where plant growth and industrial decay conspired to create an imbricated

space – and the “new” High Line – where architectural design and horticultural efforts unite built

26
 IMBRICATED SPACES

and natural forms – indicates a particular spatial and aesthetic manifestation of the broader city-

nature hybridity that has been recognized by social scientists and contemporary cultural

producers and receivers alike (Cronon 1991; Gandy 2002; Millington 2013; Angelo 2016).

Representations of city’s and nature’s agency in the High Line and other contemporary park

developments indicate a cultural shift away from the more conspicuously constructed displays of

nature found in prior generations of parks and toward more “authentic” representations, and also

connotes an expanding appreciation for the place of “nature” in human/urban society. Though

earlier cultural producers like Olmsted, along with writers, artists, and wilderness

preservationists like John Muir, celebrated natural landscapes, it is a different thing to accord

“nature” the agentic primacy to shape human geographies in the way suggested by the High Line

and other green planning initiatives, where nature, rather than being displaced by urbanization, is

now being incorporated within urban processes – for example, by re-building “resilient” cities

after natural disasters (Gotham and Greenberg 2014) or the development of “green

infrastructure” and urban farming (Colasanti et al. 2013). Imbricated spaces quite literally bring

these wide-ranging cultural and metabolic changes to the city-nature and society-nature

relationships into view, presenting cultural receivers with an aesthetic of shared agency that

“naturalizes” the apparent harmony of built and natural forms in contemporary urban areas.

My analysis of the High Line suggests that there is a temporal dimension to the creation

of imbricated spaces. The long decline of industrial cities in the second half of the twentieth

century is central to their emergence in the West; more broadly, it is clear that some amount of

time must pass for the urban built environment to decay and for nature to blossom in the

concrete’s cracks. It is therefore an open question as to whether imbricated spaces can be found

within “new” built environments. In Chicago, for example, the city’s highly valorized

27
 IMBRICATED SPACES

Millennium Park (opened in 2004) is surrounded by skyscrapers, and the park’s central

attraction, the mirrored Cloud Gate sculpture (popularly known as “the Bean”), reflects city,

trees, and sky in distorted images; on the surface, these aesthetic elements might suggest an

affinity with the High Line. However, the mere visual unity of urban and natural elements is an

insufficient condition for an imbricated space. In their novelty, Millennium Park and other like

spaces do not invite park users to reflect on the passage of time or to see decaying city and

insurgent nature as active agents in the creation of social spaces. While both Millennium Park

and the High Line reflect the triumph of small-scale postmodern urbanism and contemporary

urban regimes’ penchant for spectacle, the parks diverge in terms of the way that “nature” is

deployed (manicured vs. wild), the way that “city” is represented (new vs. old), and the

representation of agency in the creation of the space (humans vs. city/nature). Certainly,

architects and planners have the tools to fabricate the built environment’s “decay”; but the

Friends of the High Line’s painstaking recreation of the High Line’s original imbricated space

indicates that this dialectic of decay and insurgence must be deemed “authentic,” i.e., that the

appearance of city’s or nature’s agency in social space must be seen as legitimate by cultural

producers and receivers. This question of agency and authenticity is what distinguishes

imbricated spaces from other intersections of built and natural environments, broadly speaking; it

is the difference between the overgrown ruins of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station (Figure 7)

and manicured vines climbing the walls of a university building (Figure 8).

[Figure 7 about here]

[Figure 8 about here]

Other cultural images of city-nature hybridity, such as photographs of imbricated spaces,

recall Collins’s (2004: 98) notion of “the secondary circulation of symbols.” Photographic or

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 IMBRICATED SPACES

literary representations of city-nature hybrids are central to the “resonance” and “retrievability”

(Schudson 1989) of converging natural and social forms; these second-order cultural images

disseminate the power of imbricated spaces, furthering their visibility across geographic and

demographic boundaries and naturalizing the political-economic and cultural structures behind

their creation. “Ruin porn” connotes these sorts of images at their most problematic – creating an

aesthetic of industrial and social decay that naturalizes institutional neglect (Kinney 2012) – but

these images are not always tied to the racialized “re-colonization” of industrial districts (see for

example the emergence of postindustrial bike tours in the rural Appalachian Mountains

[Kracklauer 2015]). The symbolic and spatial convergence of built and natural environments also

has implications for ontologies of humans, city, and nature (Shaw 2014; Haraway 1991;

Jerolmack and Tavory 2014), cultural dimensions of global warming and other products of the

Anthropocene (Clark 2014), and the politics of urban metabolism (Wachsmuth 2012), all of

which suggests the need to further interrogate the historical geographies of imbricated spaces and

their related cultural objects.

Beyond contemporary urban parks, the imbricated space concept has implications for

urban and cultural social scientists as it offers a lens into broader intersections between the

natural and the social. As scholars have illustrated, people make meaning out of interactions with

natural objects and form community around shared experiences with “nature” (Fine 1998;

Jerolmack 2012). The imbricated space concept helps scholars understand one iteration of the

ways that these relationships are not just symbolic, but occur in culturally produced social

spaces: even practices that take place in the “wilderness” of “first nature” rely on cultural

understandings about the state of nature and turn these natural spaces into social spaces through

human activity (Cronon 1996). Ultimately, imbricated spaces may be one of many ways that the

29
 IMBRICATED SPACES

natural and the cultural converge at the level of social space; this paper is a step in uncovering

what these spaces look like and how they are created.

VI. TABLES

Table 1: The ontological separation of city and nature.

City: Nature:
Capitalism Feudalism
Modernity Premodernity
Society Community
Industry Agriculture
Profane Sacred
Nation God
Masculinity Femininity

Table 2: The unity of city and nature.

City: Nature:
Industry’s Afterlife Anthropocene
Decay Insurgence
Unity:
Hybridity
Imbricated Spaces
Urban Metabolism
Planetary Urbanization

VIII. ENDNOTES
1
This is not to suggest that Olmsted thought cities were “evil”; Olmsted is arguing here that the

socio-spatial conditions of cities, in their density and multiplicity, can create problematic social-

psychological conditions and harbor diseases. Nature then serves as a remedy to these “evil”

urban conditions.
2
Cost as of 2015 per the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

30
VII: FIGURES
Figure 1: Olmsted’s picturesque design in Central Park’s Ramble. Photo by author, 2013.

Figure 2: Skyscrapers modify the pastoral landscape in Olmsted’s Sheep Meadow, Central Park.
Photo by author, 2013.
 IMBRICATED SPACES

Figure 3: Industry and greenery at the High Line. Photo by author, 2011.

Figure 4: The High Line’s design team, especially landscape designer Piet Oudolf, cultivated
plant life that resembled the railway’s “wild” heydey of the 1980s and 90s. Photo by author,
2013.

32
 IMBRICATED SPACES

Figure 5: The sunken overlook of the Tenth Avenue Square. Photo by author, 2011.

Figure 6: The industrial picturesque. Photo by author, 2011.

33
 IMBRICATED SPACES

Figure 7: The iconic ruins of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station. Photo by Joe Braun
(http://www.citrusmilo.com/)

Figure 8: Manicured ivy at the University of Chicago. Photo by Egis (http://itcolossal.com/).

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 IMBRICATED SPACES

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