Scholars have long understood that nature is socially constructed, but not all forms of nature are constructed equally. Social power informs which cultural objects representing nature – like plants, parks, and landscapes – are accorded more or less cultural value. Like other processes of evaluation (Bourdieu 1984; Khan 2011; Lamont 1992), evaluations of nature’s cultural value tend to reaffirm the dispositions and ideologies of dominant social groups (Bermingham 1986; Copley and Garside 1994). Understanding how powerful social actors impart representations of nature with differential cultural value is therefore essential for advancing sociological studies of the environment (Loughran 2023).

In contemporary culture, “authenticity” has become a locus of power and distinction, applied to objects as well as people, places, and social practices (Grazian 2018b; Hibbett 2005; Peterson 1997). How does nature fit into that cultural logic? What accounts for cultural producers’ judgments about the authenticity of nature – a concept long assumed to stand outside of culture (Williams 1973)? How do cultural producers attempt to create an authentic vision of nature? I investigate these questions in the context of postindustrial parks, which are conspicuous for their cultural and economic power as well as for how they crystallize meanings of nature in a time when those meanings are being renegotiated and understood in new ways.Footnote 1

By examining the intentions (Griswold 1987) of the creators of postindustrial parks, this study uncovers how nature is socially constructed with high social value through appeals to environmental authenticity. First, cultural producers’ vision of nature is local; plants (and other design elements) included in authentic park spaces must be considered native to the respective geographic area and reflective of local ecological conditions. Second, cultural producers’ vision of nature is wild; in contrast to the manicured displays of traditional urban parks, representations of nature in postindustrial parks are made to look unkempt or haphazard – appearing less like the cultivated products of designers and gardeners. Finally, in contemporary park designs, nature is imbricated (Loughran 2016) with the built environment, as postindustrial spaces bring together representations of both nature and city. The social construction of environmental authenticity is informed by a similar evaluation of the built environment’s authenticity. Older built environments – in the form of warehouses, factories, highways, and railways – are used to frame postindustrial parks in picturesque ways (Herrington 2006), helping to paint today’s urban park landscapes with a patina of age that cultural producers read as authentic.

This paper draws on planning documents, interviews, and public comments by landscape architects and other cultural producers to examine how “nature” is socially constructed and aesthetically framed in the most highly capitalized and culturally valorized contemporary urban parks. Three US parks are the cases: New York’s High Line, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park. The High Line, opened in 2009 to critical and popular acclaim, has become the Central Park of its time (Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992), greatly influencing urban boosters in other cities (Molotch 1976) to pursue its similar melding of green and grey materials (Wachsmuth and Angelo 2018), linear walking path, passive recreation, and privatized management. The Bloomingdale Trail/606, opened in 2015, was one of the first parks to debut in the High Line’s shadow; it brought to the fore questions of gentrification and racialized displacement that now ensnare postindustrial parks everywhere (Rigolon and Németh 2018). Buffalo Bayou Park, built along the eponymous waterway, also opened in 2015 and was forced to contend with a much fuller spectrum of nature’s forces than the New York and Chicago versions, as it was flooded by one trillion gallons of water during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

These three cases collectively illustrate the concerns of cultural producers who are constructing environmentally authentic spaces in the context of privatized urban parks in large US cities. More broadly, the analysis points to an emerging impulse to construct nature in new ways: disrupting the epistemological binaries that historically upheld built and natural environments as oppositional – i.e., that cities were without nature, that urbanization was a process that stood outside of nature and could only dominate and destroy nature – contemporary cultural producers see built and natural environments as socially linked, mutually constitutive, and socially beneficial (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2020). Building on and synthesizing previous research (Loughran 2016, 2022), the paper points, more generally, to the ideological resonance and cultural power bound up in authentic displays of nature.

Nature and the Production of Authenticity

Since the 1990s, sociological studies of cultural production and consumption have highlighted the rise in authenticity narratives around cultural objects.Footnote 2 Sociologists have illustrated how authenticity has become central to contemporary cultural tastes and have critiqued the concept for the ways that privileged social actors fixate on it and use it to reproduce inequalities (Grazian 2018b; Zukin 2008). Its sociological valence is well understood in cultural realms stretching from food to music to neighborhoods (Brown-Saracino 2009; Johnston and Baumann 2014; Peterson 1997). The sum conclusion of existing studies is that many people desire cultural objects that feel real – that objects deemed authentic express some meaningful essence about the objects themselves (Griswold et al. 2013), the people who create them, and/or the places where they were created. Judgments about authenticity are subjective and relational (Varriale 2016); conveying an authentic cultural object can be profitable for cultural producers who understand consumer tastes and shape their cultural products around those tastes. Numerous studies have demonstrated the labor that goes into fabricating authenticity for audiences (Grazian 2003; Rosenthal 2008).

Nature, as a socially constructed concept, intersects with discourses about authenticity in several ways. Menrisky (2019) argues that claims about authenticity have been key to environmental politics since at least the 1960s. Authentic foods, as cultural objects formed with the material products of earth, are another example. Given the fetishization of such foods, notions of place have come to fundamentally shape evaluations of foods and foodways (Johnston and Baumann 2014); in the eyes of many consumers, especially socially elite ones, the more detailed the provenance of local, organic foods, the better (Mapes 2018). Through such discourses and related practices, certain places and landscapes are imbued with authentic cultural meanings – a judgment that typically links directly to economic value and race (Byrd 2019; Demossier 2011). The consumption of authentic foods is by extension the consumption of the authentic landscapes that produced them.

In general, feelings about nature are shaped by experiences with cultural objects that represent nature, as Angelo’s (2013) study of birdwatchers and ornithologists indicates, and as Fine (2003) documents in his study of mushroom foragers. Cultural objects like birds and mushrooms are socially necessary for constructing ideas, narratives, and practices about and in nature. In these respects, cultural objects that represent nature are no different from any other cultural object (Griswold 2012); while the appeal to nature unlocks a powerful web of connotations (Loughran 2016; Williams 1973), the processes of imparting meaning upon materiality are the same. The creation of authentic settings is especially relevant for the present analysis, as park developers and landscape architects use the symbols of nature to set a scene: parks are a stage and a setting for interactions with cultural objects that represent nature. In that respect, their cultural production has much in common with zoos (Grazian 2018a), green tourism destinations (Hernández-Mogollón et al. 2013), and urban streetscapes (Borer 2017; Lloyd 2004), as well as with other authentically rendered spaces that have little to do with ideas about nature, like music venues and restaurants (Gaytán 2008; Grazian 2003).

Urban Parks and the Representation of Nature

Representing a vision of nature has been central to urban parks’ social construction since their invention amid nineteenth-century urbanization. The creation of large, picturesque parks like New York’s Central Park was driven by a number of political-economic and cultural factors (Angelo 2020; Loughran 2020), and chief among them was providing a simulacrum of nature as “wilderness” (Cronon 1996) for recreation as well as for admiration (Schuyler 1986). Parks like Central Park, along with the establishment of landscape architecture as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century, institutionalized (see Schudson 1989) picturesque aesthetics and cemented a (limited) universe of meanings – meanings that still inform park designs even as contemporary cultural producers create new ones. A sense of authenticity has always been central to the design and creation of urban parks, even if the cultural producers of the past did not think of their parks in such terms, and even as they – much like cultural producers today – were acutely aware that they were often transforming the existing local ecology to make it look like a very different, more socially valued representation of nature (Loughran 2020; see also Olmsted 1871).

Maintaining the illusion of authenticity in urban parks has proved challenging over time, in part because authenticity is expensive. The same city governments and private developers who invested heavily in fabricating nature in the White, elite sections of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US cities (Walker et al. 2023) later disinvested from these same spaces as White flight and economic retrenchment drove socially privileged cultural receivers (Griswold 2012) away from the historical spaces of environmental authenticity (Lee et al. 2023; Loughran 2017). While picturesque traditions were still unfolding in the early twentieth century in more recently colonized places like Los Angeles and Houston (Comey 1913), the design concepts that were used for most of the twentieth century further shifted urban park aesthetics away from renderings of nature and toward more utilitarian and functional spaces for active recreation (Cranz 1982; Wrede and Adams 1991).

In postindustrial contexts, landscape architects and other cultural producers have reasserted authenticity as an important park attribute. Following the postindustrial gentrification of older cities, parks have again become vessels for economic and cultural investment (Madden 2010; Zukin 2010). In line with the broader cultural turn that has made large cities into postmodern entertainment capitals (Lloyd and Clark 2001; Sorkin 1992), new parks have become green extensions of that cultural framework – spaces like Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s Little Island are powerful examples. Bringing nature into this urban-cultural nexus is symbolically complex: on the one hand, nature in cities has historically been understood to exist in opposition to urban social forces (Wachsmuth 2012); on the other hand, in the context of the urbanization of the entire planet (Brenner 2014), the forms of socially constructed nature that are presented in traditional cities have become interwoven with material forms typically understood as the objects of human creation (i.e., the built environment). The idea that today’s urban parks embody a slice of “wilderness” simply cannot hold in the context of twenty-first-century urbanization. The creators of new parks, then, look not necessarily to a first nature long-ago extirpated by urbanization, but to a postindustrial second nature (Gandy 2022) as the material and symbolic basis for park design and development.

Case Studies

Analysis of environmental authenticity is drawn from three case studies: New York’s High Line, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park. These three parks are three of the most celebrated and powerful examples of the emergent genre of postindustrial park (Loughran 2022; Millington 2013; Way 2013). Together they bring together the principal components of today’s iteration of environmental authenticity.

Though the High Line, opened in New York in 2009, was not the first postindustrial park ever built (see, e.g., Parc André-Citroën in Paris or Gas Works Park in Seattle), it is the one that has sparked dozens of imitators and remains the iconic space to which all other postindustrial parks are inevitably compared. Built atop an elevated railway that closed to rail traffic in 1980, the site was a controversial piece of infrastructure in the 1980s and 90s, with adversarial groups vying to preserve, dismantle, or re-use the space. It was preserved and redeveloped as a park under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral administration, following the advocacy and fundraising of the Friends of the High Line, a private group that has consummated a neoliberal model of public park management (Holtzman 2021; Madden 2010). The park has been a central component of the massive upscaling of an already-gentrified part of New York, and now figures prominently in critiques of “green gentrification” (Gould and Lewis 2017). Culturally, its design was heralded as revolutionary by critics and the public, seen as a firm break from the very concept of what an urban park could or should be.

Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail, also known as the 606 (see Loughran 2022, 67), was one of the first parks to offer a new version of the High Line, as it was built on a very similar site – a disused elevated railroad traversing just a few miles of relatively dense urban space. Opened six years after the High Line, in 2015, gentrification concerns hung over the development of the park, which moved people through four racially and class-mixed communities: Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Bucktown, and Wicker Park. Like the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 was built with a mix of public and private funds and championed by a powerful mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Its design is unique in some ways because the elevated railroad had been built atop a concrete basin, rather than as a viaduct perched on steel beams like the High Line. In other ways, its designers made aesthetic choices that were very similar to those found on the High Line.

Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, also opened in 2015, transports the linear, postindustrial design to a different context: two banks of a winding, slow-moving urban river. Buffalo Bayou is the central waterway for downtown Houston, put to recreational as well as industrial purposes (east of downtown, far from the new park, the bayou becomes the heavily polluted Houston Ship Channel, where it is lined with oil refineries). At Buffalo Bayou Park, the built environment hovers around and above the park in the form of highways, which were built in past decades to transport people in and out of downtown Houston (Shelton 2017). Historically, the site paralleled those infrastructures and had been the site of flood control efforts, as a half-dozen tributaries drained into it (Winningham 2003). The design for transforming this infrastructural space into a public park thus called upon different landscape strategies, given the expectation that the park would be under water at least annually, while maintaining design aspects that had been celebrated at the High Line and other postindustrial parks. Compared to the High Line and the Bloomingdale Trail/606, it was built with an even greater degree of private oversight and control (Loughran 2022).

The data presented in this paper are drawn from a range of documents: planning documents, interviews with cultural producers, as well as materials published by park designers and developers – including lectures, a documentary film, and a book – that attempt to brandish their reputations while also explicating their respective approaches to postindustrial landscape architecture. When examined critically, these materials provide additional evidence of the emerging ideologies of environmental authenticity that guide postindustrial park design.

Methodologically, the study follows Griswold’s (1987) “methodological framework for the sociology of culture,” which calls for scholars to blend the more positivistic approaches to the study of culture long dominant in the social sciences with a humanistic perspective that takes seriously the content of cultural objects and not merely their form. While one limitation of the present study is the exclusive focus on cultural producers – to fully apprehend postindustrial parks, an analysis of cultural receivers is required – this research design is justified by the need to critically interrogate the motives and ideologies of powerful social actors and institutions (Mills 1956). The study employs an inductive logic of inquiry and a mix of qualitative methods, which draws inspiration from the inductive, mixed-methods paradigm developed by W. E. B. Du Bois in works like The Philadelphia Negro (2007b [1899]), which “champion[s] the use of any and all methodological tools at our disposal” (Conwell and Loughran 2023, 19).

Authentic Landscapes as Local

Authentic landscapes are local. While this might seem self-evident, in that all physical social spaces have geographic locations, it is a deliberate design decision to activate the characteristics of a space that color it with distinctive, place-based qualities. For landscape architects, park developers, and other park designers, postindustrial parks present an opportunity to emphasize what is socially and environmentally unique about a given site and its surrounding region. In one sense, this is a departure from the landscape architectural styles of the past, which, when deployed either in picturesque or modernist variants, tended to delete the already-existing landscape in favor of a space seen as better suited for the social and aesthetic needs of the moment (Copley and Garside 1994; Wrede and Adams 1991). In practice, that meant that most picturesque parks designed in the nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries were derivative of New York’s Central Park, creating a universalizing park aesthetic that paid little respect to local people or local ecologies (Loughran 2020). Likewise, as parks built in the style of architectural modernism proliferated later in the twentieth century, park designers made fewer appeals to nature as new parks were filled with baseball fields, basketball courts, and other spaces for institutionalized active recreation (Cranz 1982). As with the picturesque’s universalizing quality, styles are copied, and modernist parks largely had similar designs, regardless of social and environmental geography (see DiMaggio and Powell 1983). As the similar designs of the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Buffalo Bayou Park attest, aesthetic isomorphism (Wasserman 2011) remains a powerful social force in postindustrial parks.

The emphasis that contemporary park creators place on “the local” is put into practice as much narratively as it is materially – evidenced by the fact that many postindustrial parks also look alike, meaning that either “the local” is curiously similar across these postindustrial contexts, or that the cultural weight of this landscape architectural style is too powerful for designers to deviate from it. (It is possible that, in establishing this new aesthetic template for urban parks, the High Line’s acclaimed design has set the standard for what authentic postindustrial spaces are supposed to look like; a subsequent design that appears too different might not only invite negative reviews from critics and the public, but it might raise questions about authenticity.)

Making postindustrial parks authentic through appeals to the local takes several forms. At the Bloomingdale Trail/606, designers attempted to highlight the geospatial location of the park in terms of its relationship to Lake Michigan (a common spatial referent throughout the city) by placing “three enigmatic compass rose-like ‘medallions’ that indicate the [park’s] East/West axis” at each mile marker (Whitehead 2014, 23). Per the project’s lead artist, Frances Whitehead:

The unusual East-West arrows turn convention on its head, re-orienting the viewer towards the Lake. These transgressive mapping elements eschew the convention and abstraction of the north arrow, and send the viewers’ attention along the axis of the bioregion reconnecting to the reality of place. (Whitehead 2014, 23)

Capturing the ecological influence of Lake Michigan informed the selection of plants for the park, as well. In a feature termed the “Environmental Sentinel,” designers planted 453 native Apple Serviceberry trees the length of the Bloomingdale Trail/606. According to Whitehead, like Japan’s cherry blossoms, the plant’s “five-day bloom spread will visualize Chicago’s famous Lake Effect. These temperature-sensitive plants will serve as environmental ‘sentinels’ for Chicago, bio-indicators of microclimate change” as warming temperatures alter their blooming patterns (Whitehead 2014, 20).

At Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, connections to the local were made in similar ways, with cultural producers drawing on plants considered well-suited to the setting. Because of the precarious riverine ecology in which the landscape was built, park designers had to consider not only what would symbolically evoke Houston and the southeast Texas ecology but what could survive being underwater for periods of time. Discussing the park’s unique location a few months prior to its inundation during Hurricane Harvey, landscape architect Scott McCready expected that the entire park “below the very tops of the slopes will go under water relatively frequently—at least a couple times a year” (Asgarian 2017, 1). Buffalo Bayou Park’s designers therefore built a resilient landscape, reducing fifty percent of existing lawns in favor of marsh vegetation areas and planting over 13,000 water-absorbing trees in the 160-acre park (Asgarian 2017). At Buffalo Bayou Park, building materials, too, would take on this local hue; as McCready explained, the designers “developed a vocabulary that is very specific to this environment, with these heavy guardrails and light fixtures that can withstand going under water and systems of planting that are robust enough to withstand the frequent inundation” (Baumgardner and McCready 2016, 11:45–12:26).

Just what “the local” means in these processes of constructing authentic landscapes is open to interpretation. From the perspective of cultural producers, native plants are useful cultural objects in such spaces, particularly when linked to narratives that turn these and other design gestures into powerful ecological symbols. What aspects of the local do cultural producers wish to emphasize? In postindustrial sites, past urban transformations are more than part of the story, meaning that “the local” is about more than just plants, but recognizing how past uses of, and changes to, these sites have been part of their social production over time. As discussed in the next section, not all of that history is commemorated – only what fits into the desired narrative (see Hunter et al. 2018). At the High Line, for example, where the site was surrounded by dense manufacturing and commercial spaces, the park’s designers created a metal frame to mimic a billboard that previously occupied the same space, at the “viewing spur” at 26th Street. This feature allowed park users to look out into the city and for people in buildings and sidewalks to have a focused view of people in the park. 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, 11:19-11:41)

Especially at the High Line and Buffalo Bayou Park, cultural producers explicitly desired to “restore” some ecological aspect of the sites. But what exactly was “local” about the new landscapes could involve a fairly large geographic scale. At Buffalo Bayou Park, for example, marketing rhetoric from the park’s private boosters at the Buffalo Bayou Partnership gave the impression that the site’s “nature” had been restored through the construction of the park, while the designers understood that what existed at the site was the product of more recent transformations, and that the park was not recreating some long-ago, untouched ecology. As landscape architect Scott McCready noted, Buffalo Bayou’s channelization in the 1950s had “straightened out a lot of the sinuousity of the channel and resulted in a landscape now that is very far from its original, natural state. Even though Houstonians as they view [the park], see it as natural” (Baumgardner and McCready 2016, 9:20–9:31). To bring the landscape within a regional, if not exactly site-specific, environmental authenticity, McCready explained:

We … structured the planting in ways to really bring forth the unique character and ecology: using cypress and cottonwoods and sycamore trees that are more associated with the riparian corridor of the bayou and bring them to the forefront[.] … [T]he species diversity and the plantings that replaced a lot of the areas that were maintained by mowed turf in an effort to restore the ecology and really restore the character[.] (Baumgardner and McCready 2016, 14:17-14:42)

In sum, cultural producers make gestures to the local through material design choices that are reinforced by narratives that situate the parks as existing authentically in their highly urbanized sites. These aesthetic and rhetorical moves are rendered authentic by their assumed appropriateness for the local context: the routine flooding that poses challenges at Buffalo Bayou Park is not a concern on the elevated High Line and Bloomingdale Trail/606. Similarly, Buffalo Bayou Park lacks the spatial and symbolic connections to the industrial economies of the early twentieth century and the associated built environments, so gestures like the High Line’s billboard frame, which assert proximity to dense, commercialized urban spaces, are absent because they would not be understood as authentic by cultural producers. While the opaqueness of “the local” offers opportunities for the designers and marketers of these spaces (it is a concept that can be helpfully stretched – symbolically, geographically, and ecologically – when convenient) – it also constrains things. These parks have to foreground the local, otherwise they risk being perceived as inauthentic.

Authentic Landscapes as Wild

Authentic landscapes are wild. As noted above, in the context of twenty-first-century urbanization, the idea that even the “wildest” urban park spaces connote some genuine “wilderness” requires park users to suspend disbelief. Urban parks today present not as untapped, nonhuman ecosystems, but as symbolic landscapes composed of cultural objects that evoke various ideas about nature. Exactly what version of nature is expressed through design exists on something of a continuum. Nature might present as “merely” symbolic, as Lefebvre (1991 [1974], 30) argues: “It is still the background of the picture; as décor, and more than décor, it persists everywhere, and every natural detail, every natural object is valued even more as it takes on symbolic weight[.]” In postindustrial parks, nature is presented as “more than décor”: the wild-looking landscapes favored by landscape architects and other cultural producers express the idea that nature maintains the power and agency to shape landscapes, despite humanity’s interventions in, and degradation of, the environment (a conceptualization that, it should be noted, reaffirms the epistemological separation of nature and society [Wachsmuth 2012]).

Before the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Buffalo Bayou Park became intriguing sites for new parks, they were in varying states of disrepair. Plants took over the elevated rails of the New York and Chicago cases and the disinvested riverbanks of the Houston case. These “wild” spaces were also home to socially outcast people during their years of neglect in the 1980s and 90s. People on the margins were drawn to these furtive spaces located on the edges of gentrifying neighborhoods like New York’s Chelsea, Chicago’s Wicker Park, and Houston’s Montrose (Loughran 2022). Photographer Joel Sternfeld’s (2002) images of the High Line in depopulated moments brought into wider circulation the site’s neglected, overgrown landscape, which would have been, in other, non-gentrified contexts, associated with poverty rather than elite cultural capital. Initially in New York, where efforts to repurpose the railway as a park accelerated in the late 1990s, the idea that a wild, shabby garden in the middle of a railroad could be considered beautiful and culturally valuable gained mainstream appreciation through the public relations efforts of the Friends of the High Line.

For cultural producers, building parks within these “imbricated spaces” (Loughran 2016) meant that the plants (and the people) that inhabited them during the days of disinvestment would have to be removed in order to make the sites accessible to the wider public, as well as to become showpieces for a new kind of landscape design. Despite this deracination, the memory of the wild spaces persisted in cultural producers’ collective memories and guided certain aspects of the parks’ designs. Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond found “another world” atop the elevated railway in the late 1990s, describing his first visit in terms that emphasized the wildness of the landscape:

You walked out 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 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)

Cultural producers also memorialized the Bloomingdale Trail/606 and Buffalo Bayou Park in terms of their wild pasts, though given variation in the racialized identities of the people using the respective spaces in the 1980s and 90s, those narratives diverge in expected ways (Loughran 2022, 116–119). Again, prior to their redevelopment as parks, these were spaces used by marginalized people in all three cases. In Chicago, Josh Deth, a co-founder of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, romanticized the site’s past:

There were lots of hypodermic needles up there and beer cans and broken bottles. There was a homeless encampment at Kimball. One homeless guy at Leavitt hooked up electrical wires to the local power grid and had a TV in there. . . . Part of it is that you’re in this space where there’s no rules, because the cops didn’t really go up there. . . . There was an old piano up there at one point. I don’t know how the hell someone got a piano up there, but they sure did. (Dudek 2015, 3)

In Houston, Rich Kinder, the principal private donor behind Buffalo Bayou Park, found such episodes less romantic and more unsavory and unsafe, claiming that the space “was tremendously, really a disaster. I used to run there, and you never knew what was around the next turn, whether it was a syringe or a beer bottle or whatever” (Urban Land Institute 2015, 29:10–29:20).

No matter the interpretation of the three sites’ recent pasts, these histories informed the designs of the new parks. Part of constructing an authentic postindustrial space is to, at minimum, narratively pay tribute to the past; that act is part of what roots the designs in local social space, as described in the previous section. Even in Rich Kinder’s critical retelling, his story still has a cultural purpose: it says that these sites are edgy and avant garde – even the sanitized, redeveloped versions can have a cool residue.

The High Line, as the first case to be built and the case where memories of the site’s past were most frequently articulated, several of the park’s cultural producers spoke to a desire to recapture the wild authenticity of the original imbricated space. City planning chair Amanda Burden, one of the key cultural producers of the park, noted: “[Y]ou had to do the minimal interventions. Because you wanted to keep what was magical, you wanted to keep the old and just enough new interventions to make it something special” (Dunn and Piper 2012, 5:47–6:02). Tasked with mimicking the site’s original plants to recapture that “magic” was landscape designer Piet Oudolf, whose work had been described by one critic as moving landscape design “away from the soft pornography of the flower” (McGrane 2008, 1). Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond commented appreciatively:

Piet composed grasses and perennials in naturalistic ways, and he left the dead material on the plants in winter, to create sculptural shapes in the snow. When you looked at these photos [of his past work], you thought, if there is anyone who can create something as beautiful as the High Line in its natural state, it is Piet. (David and Hammond 2011, 77)

The claim that the High Line had a “natural state” speaks to how authentic postindustrial parks are created through discursive claims to the wild. Nature is envisioned as the true or original creator of what was so aesthetically unique about these kinds of spaces; cultural producers see their role, in part, as reproducing what nature had alone made. Plants are especially useful cultural objects here – selecting plants that suggest a wild origin and arranging them in such a way to symbolize that the landscape is a co-production of humans and non-human nature. As High Line architect Ric Scofidio recalled, the park’s design allowed plants to grow all around the rails and other built components of the park: “I think what won us the [design] competition was the idea of a concrete planking system. Rather than pouring a hardscape or a macadam path, is a planking system that could feather into the landscape” (Dunn and Piper 2012, 6:48–7:14). As with picturesque landscape architects’ appeals to the “wilderness,” postindustrial park creators are not necessarily fooling cultural receivers – the spaces are quite obviously architectural creations – but these efforts symbolically situate these spaces as different from more traditional urban parks and more clearly cultivated spaces like botanic gardens.

A final component of how cultural producers construct postindustrial parks as authentic through appeals to the idea of the wild is by envisioning the spaces themselves as having their own, ongoing agency that would be impacted by, and continue through, the architectural interventions. Ric Scofidio argued:

It was really important for us to keep it simple, to allow the structure itself to survive and breathe and be understood. First time I came up here, I discovered the plants were incredibly opportunistic. Where there was sun, you had one kind of grass that was growing. Where there was shade, you had a different plant that was growing. When we started thinking about the design, we realized that we could be opportunistic as the plants. (Dunn and Piper 2012, 7:35-8:31; emphasis added)

Indeed, the High Line’s designers were so invested in this idea that they adopted the slogan “Keep it Simple, Keep it Wild, Keep it Slow, and Keep it Quiet” to guide their work (David and Hammond 2011). Robert Hammond extended this notion, framing the park’s cultural producers as stewards of this wild legacy:

We had distributed comment cards to those assembled at the Grand Central exhibition [a display of architectural boards for a 2003 “ideas competition” prior to the selection of the park’s eventual design]. On my favorite one, the commenter wrote, “The High Line should be preserved, untouched, as a wilderness area. No doubt you will ruin it. So it goes.” … It spoke to my biggest fear: I loved what it was like up there, as it was. I was afraid that no matter what we designed, it would lose that magic. Until the day we opened, I was secretly scared that we were going to ruin it. (David and Hammond 2011, 61)

The social construction of a space as wild, like other characteristics of environmental authenticity, is ultimately open to interpretation and critique. While the cultural producers of the High Line saw their park as having fidelity with what they viewed as the “truly” authentic version – the uncultivated site that preceded the park – not everyone encounters their design in such a way. Frances Whitehead, lead artist of the Bloomingdale Trail/606, also believed that postindustrial parks should work in the service of an ecological mission. But, turning the High Line’s designers’ mantra back on them, she argued:

I think [the High Line is] overwrought. It’s over-designed. . . . If you go back to the original . . . Friends of the High Line motto, . . . their motto was “keep it wild.” That was the ambition: “Keep it wild.” Well I would say they failed. There’s nothing wild about it. . . . And I’m a fan of the landscape concept of the urban wild. I’m very interested in wildness inside the city. (Interview by the author, October 2016)

Whitehead’s critique makes it clear that authenticity is a central means by which new park landscapes are judged, and that claims about the wild can help create that sense of authenticity.

Authentic Landscapes as Imbricated

In authentic postindustrial landscapes, nature is socially constructed as imbricated with urban space. In other words, cultural objects that represent nature are interwoven with cultural objects that represent the city or the urban (Loughran 2016). While nineteenth-century landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux attempted to disguise their heavily engineered park landscapes as slices of wilderness, making them appear to be only minimally touched by design, twentieth-century skyscrapers outpaced the stone walls and oak trees that spatially and symbolically partitioned picturesque parks from the city beyond. If these spaces were ever credibly understood as “wilderness,” a horizon dominated by skyscrapers has a disabusing effect.

That is not to say that the picturesque landscapes of old were devoid of buildings, roads, lighting systems, and other visible infrastructures that punctured the illusion of unadulterated nature. Some of these objects were placed in parks against the wishes of landscape architects; as Olmsted (2010 [1876], 141) 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.

At the same time, buildings that expressed melancholy and the passage of time were appreciated aspects of picturesque landscapes, as they imparted such spaces with the patina of age. As picturesque aesthetic philosopher William Gilpin (1792, 27) plainly asked, “Is there a greater ornament of landscape, than the ruins of a castle?”.

Postindustrial park architects are repurposing Gilpin’s embrace of the aged and antiquated as they incorporate older, often decayed, built environments into their park designs. The very existence of green space on the High Line was predicated upon the deindustrialization of the surrounding area and the abandonment of the railway that brought materials in and out of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. In such settings, landscape architects often attempt to draw out a broader melancholia that captures not only the former industrial sites that have been redeveloped as public parks, but the surrounding cityscapes as well, which are typically comprised of warehouses and factories, industrial waterfronts, and highways. Some of these spaces similarly have been converted to new uses, as in the common case of residential loft conversions (Zukin 1982). Through the architectural techniques described below, park developers and designers attempt to visually root new parks within a broader postindustrial landscape.

Typically left out of these narratives are the perspectives of deindustrialization “from below” – from the people whose communities were irreparably harmed by the loss of jobs at time one and the gentrification associated with postindustrial park development at time two. Indeed, park developers like the Friends of the High Line’s Joshua David and landscape architects like Matthew Urbanski, who co-designed the Bloomingdale Trail/606, are fond of referring to these deindustrialized sites as “found objects,” which begs the question: “found by whom?” (Loughran 2022, 134).

Landscapes that bring together objects representing nature and objects representing city are created by landscape architects in several ways. One, plants within the parks are often seeded in patterns that thread in and out of built objects like rails and walking paths, mimicking the original landscapes that were uprooted to build the parks; shrubs and tall, wild-looking grasses and herbaceous plants tend to be far more common sights in postindustrial parks than in traditional, tightly mowed urban parks, further suggesting to park users that the forms of nature found in postindustrial parks are less cultivated than those found elsewhere. Second, postindustrial parks, which are often several stories above (the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606) or below (Buffalo Bayou Park) street grade, present park users with distinctive perspectives on cityscapes. Park designers seek to accentuate such views by framing skyscrapers and other buildings for park users; while in some cases such views recall Edmund Burke’s (2015 [1757]) notion of the sublime (e.g., the Empire State Building as seen from the High Line), more often, postindustrial parks’ picturesque views center vernacular buildings and even visually connect to plants on the ostensible outside of park spaces. Third, in instances where park designers create new buildings within the parks, these too are created with aged, hardy aesthetic sensibilities.

Part of what is remarkable about constructing authenticity in postindustrial parks, when contextualized by the long history of urban parks, is cultural producers’ admiration of the built environment. The picturesque landscape architects of the nineteenth century endeavored to keep views of the built environment out of park spaces, for fears that such objects would disturb contemplative experiences with green landscapes, as indicated in the above quotation from Olmsted. These ideas were also connected to racialized fears about deleterious aspects of urbanization in the US and elsewhere – such as demographic change, pollution, crowdedness, and crime (Loughran 2020; Taylor 2009). For urban elites of the nineteenth century, industrial infrastructures – and the accompanying soot, smells, and racialized labor force – were necessary for capitalism’s advance (MacLachlan 2007), but they were not celebrated.

Rather than keep “the city” out of parks, contemporary park developers symbolically embrace urban space, seeking to extol local industrial histories and twenty-first-century urbanity. The High Line’s designers drew out these connections between park and city in other design choices, such as the sunken overlook above Tenth Avenue, where part of the rail viaduct was cut out to give park users a view to the pedestrian and automotive traffic below. Architect Liz Diller commented, “The sunken overlook is a very strong gesture. Not only setting up a consensual space of observation and performance, but also it frames something that is normally thought of as extremely banal” (Dunn and Piper 2012: 9:02–9:18). Similarly, the designers of the Bloomingdale Trail/606 sought to position certain vantage points as contemplative sites of exchange between park users and the imbricated spaces both in and outside of the park; the Chicago designers’ “prospect” at Humboldt Boulevard attempted to deepen the visual exchange in such terms:

The design concept for the prospect at Humboldt Boulevard is to create an architectural communal seating area and sense of place, focused on the views of the historic boulevard below, which marks the south end of the Logan Square Boulevards District. A symmetrical bank of stepped wooden stadium bleacher-style seating is … picking up the formal geometry of the historic site and these important, dramatic views. These clean stepped forms without architectural reveal or bull nosing lend a modern feel to the historic context. Four rows of petite purple smoke trees extend the median strips below, as if the greenspace is flowing up and over the trail from the street. (Whitehead 2014, 9)

Lastly, the imbrication of objects representing nature and objects representing city extends to elements that park creators include in their designs. The most notable example comes from Buffalo Bayou Park, where the plan called for a sizable building to be constructed within the park, in order to house a restaurant and event space (as implicitly mandated by the park’s neoliberal governance structure; see Loughran 2022, 89–91). Perched just a few dozen meters from the water, parts of the building would inevitably be underwater during flood events – a totally different sort of imbrication. Architect Larry Speck explained:

We had to make the building so stout that even when the rushing waters come and maybe there’s a log coming down the water, it can ram into that concrete pier of the building and do no damage whatsoever. We even made the finish of the concrete a kind of textured, board-form concrete, so if gets a little nick or scratch in it, it’s just patina and it looks just fine. But everything in the building is understanding that there’s going to be a flood, and it has to be able to withstand that. (Speck 2019, 11:30-12:06)

In the context of the Bloomingdale Trail/606, Frances Whitehead spoke to similar ideas of how the space would develop an authentic, aged look as time passed:

[Y]ou have architecture critics looking at the High Line and looking at the 606 and they go, “where’s the rest of the design? it’s not finished.” Well yeah, it’s not finished. It’s a living thing. … Anybody can look at the High Line and see that, like, what’s going to happen to that in fifty years, when all that fancy concrete falls apart? Who’s going to be able to go in there and repair that? It’s not maintain-able. So what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen to the 606, it’s going to get the patina of age. It’s going to continue on to be the kind of industrial relic and ruin that it is. Not to go into a falsified ruin. We were very adamant that we would not dignify and would not create a false ruin. So what’s new is new. We didn’t make any fake old things. … No Disneyification. No fake ruin. No fake old stuff. (Interview by the author, October 2016)

These design concepts collectively illustrate how cultural producers envision an imbrication of nature and city to be fundamental to postindustrial parks’ authenticity. Given that the sites, prior to architectural interventions, were neglected by humans and self-seeded by plants, cultural producers see their charge as a responsibility for recreating or accentuating the original and essential imbrication as part of their design. Not only do park developers and designers prize the urban built environments that surround the parks, but cultural producers especially appreciate the qualities of the built environment that can further highlight the authenticity and uniqueness of these spaces – those that lend “the patina of age” or a sublime monumentality to the overall scene.

Conclusion

This paper has documented three components of what I term “environmental authenticity” in the context of privatized postindustrial parks in large US cities. Drawing on cultural producers’ design concepts, I identified local, wild, and imbricated as three kinds of aesthetic judgments that impart postindustrial park landscapes with high cultural value in the twenty-first century. The three components of environmental authenticity identified here are not meant to be exhaustive. I expect that there are many other aesthetic judgments that inform cultural evaluations of nature, even within categories of social space like parks and landscapes. Expanding the list of attributes that contribute to environmental authenticity does not pollute the definition of environmental authenticity offered here – environmental authenticity is a contextual cultural judgment, not a static attribute of a static cultural object. Indeed, it is highly possible that there are cases where a landscape is understood as authentic yet lacks the attributes of local, wild, and imbricated, because authenticity can be generated in many different place-based ways. Future work can examine how the social construction of authentic postindustrial landscapes as local, wild, and imbricated relates to other cultural objects representing nature. The powerful cultural tastes that have shaped landscape aesthetics do not operate independently of judgments about food, non-human animals, and other categories of cultural objects that represent nature in various ways.

Why has this model gained so much influence? Parks like the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Buffalo Bayou Park are often understood through the lens of gentrification, as many critics frame the parks, and others like them, as emerging causes. But the parks are also a clear effect of previous cycles of gentrification in postindustrial neighborhoods. The privileging of these aesthetics of nature has roots in post-World War II disinvestment in US cities (Sugrue 1996), which led to the gradual abandonment of railways and factories in many Rust Belt communities. The uncultivated plant life that blossomed in places like Wicker Park and Chelsea by the 1970s and 80s, once it was symbolically connected to the reinvention of former industrial spaces through the arts and cultural production more generally (Halle and Tiso 2014; Zukin 1982), could be interpreted as a signifier of neo-Bohemian “cool” (Lloyd 2006) rather than a signifier of racialized poverty (Loughran 2017). As the Houston case indicates, this aesthetic model, once popularized, can be successfully transposed to the Sun Belt and other contexts, with waterways and highways providing another kind of imbricated setting.

Postindustrial parks are ultimately an expansion of elite cultural tastes for landscapes. As in other domains of cultural production and consumption, older “high” (White) cultural products have become staid (Peterson and Kern 1996). The much-documented “search for authenticity” is often a search for the new and comfortably exotic – cultural objects that might be racialized or otherwise representative of some “Other” (Said 1978), but softened and sanitized through White appropriation and modification to be made safe for White consumption (Oleschuk 2017). In urban spaces, this typically White-led search for authenticity ensnares neighborhoods (Brown-Saracino 2009; Osman 2011) and even more localized sites – like the overgrown infrastructural spaces that were transformed into parks. These “wild” spaces were ripe for “discovery” when gentrifiers and park developers saw their cultural potential in the 1990s and 2000s. Cultural receivers encounter cultural objects in temporal as well as spatial contexts: as Bourdieu (1996) argues, yesterday’s avant garde is institutionalized as today’s dominant culture. Such is the case with urban parks. The architectural style ushered in by the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Buffalo Bayou Park is likely here to stay – economic pressures to re-use brownfields, and the profitability of these parks, are simply too strong for postindustrial spaces in wealthy communities to simply “rot” (Loughran 2022, 182–4). But these parks won’t seem avant garde forever. Just as Central Park and other picturesque parks were transformed in the decades and centuries that followed their construction (McCammack 2017; Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992), postindustrial parks will be reinvented over time to accommodate the social demands of the moment.

While the trends toward local, wild, and imbricated design ideas define highly capitalized postindustrial parks, they do not appear in every park, and most urban parks are not constructed or redesigned with these concepts in mind. Why is that? First, while these ideas are ascendant, they are expensive. All three of these parks cost upwards of $100 million (considerably more in the case of the High Line), which is roughly equivalent to the annual parks department budget in a large city like Houston (Loughran 2022, 91). In the absence of major private or federal dollars, this version of environmental authenticity is simply out of reach for almost every urban park in the US. Future research can consider which cultural frameworks are used in park designs where this version of environmental authenticity is not feasible. Second, despite the changes that postindustrial parks have made to collective understandings of what a park could be, picturesque and modernist spaces still predominate, and the forms of nature presented within them are still understood within racialized moral frameworks about what kinds of plants and what forms of recreation are “good” (Angelo 2020; Loughran 2017).

What do postindustrial parks reveal about the ongoing production of authenticity more broadly? For one, they reveal how ideas and images of nature – a concept long considered to stand outside of the social, a material force with its own agency (and seeming standalone authenticity) – are fabricated in ways similar to other “authentic” spaces (Gaytán 2008; Grazian 2003). Second, given the importance of cultural “distinction” in reproducing social inequality (Bourdieu 1984; Khan 2011), postindustrial parks illustrate how symbolic power becomes inscribed in social space, imparting differential cultural and economic value according to the racialized aesthetic judgments of powerful social actors.

Finally, postindustrial parks point to the possibility that cultural objects representing nature have the capacity to “naturalize” inequalities in social space. While this conclusion is beyond the scope of the present study, as cultural receivers were not part of the investigation, postindustrial parks raise the question: how does the “naturalness” that such cultural objects represent influence how cultural receivers interpret them, and what does that mean for the reproduction of inequality? For example, Buffalo Bayou Park landscape architect Scott McCready asserts that many Houstonians see the transformed landscape as “natural,” even though the designers make no such claims. What does it mean for a privatized, highly designed, and well-maintained green space to “naturally” exist in a White neighborhood while parks in Black neighborhoods and other communities of color exist outside of the elite flows of economic and cultural capital? As evidenced by the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Buffalo Bayou Park, making landscapes appear natural takes significant labor, financing, and architectural talent. The corollary of that process is that already-existing landscapes that have not been refurbished by private capital are implicitly and relationally devalued.