never mind the buildings
decades of abandonment and life as a stoic industrial remnant, it opened in 2009 as a planted promenade that reflects (sometimes self-consciously) how the city 12
itself has become an object of consumption. Surpassing its Paris inspiration, the Promenade Plantée, the repurposed High Line has become implicitly tied to the upscaling of the adjacent Meatpacking District and West Chelsea. The park’s planting strategy, termed “agri-tecture” by lead designers Field Operations, references the line’s fragmented past but takes an unsentimental stance toward its new life as a post-industrial instrument of leisure. The breakdown and obsolescence of aging postwar systems, combined with a growing population and new imperatives to efficiently manage our spatial resources, calls for the reworking and rethinking of infrastructural remnants everywhere. But there can only be so many High Lines. Infrastructure always belongs to larger systems, not least the financial, political, and social structures needed to summon the physical installations. The singularity and scale of a power plant or a reservoir is the result of enormous capital value; the network it feeds suggests a civic entrenchment transcending an immediate place and time. Like tax codes, centralized infrastructures are intricate products of bureaucratic organizations resistant to change. Both evolved to successfully meet specific and complex challenges and will not be easily replaced. Legacy networks must become both more efficient and more flexible—the aim of the vague but alluring phrase “smart grid”—but this is too important to be left to policymakers and engineers. Panelist Kazys Varnelis, editor of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, has explored the networks of one region, wrangling southern California’s pipes and wires, its asphalt freeways and concrete riverbeds, into a set of codepen-