I returned to the High Line more than a decade after its completion to see how it had evolved. During my previous visit, Section Three was still under construction and closed to the public. The first two sections remain heavily visited, meticulously maintained, and perceptually closed; returning to them offered no new readings, aside from the increased shade cast by high-rise development that has accumulated along the corridor in the past decade. Section Three stood out. Compared to the earlier sections, it inadvertently reveals a different perceptual condition. The pressure of perfection and the legibility of high-resolution detail that characterize the earlier sections appear loosened here, giving way to a more open and less tightly scripted experience.

Lead Designer: Field Operations (project Lead, Landscape Architect), Diller Scofidio & Renfro and Piet Oudolf

The project has become a canonical case in critiques of neoliberal urbanism, gentrification, and the commodification of public space. This is by now well established. What is less examined is the disciplinary contradiction it exposes: while scholars of urban theory routinely mobilise the High Line as a cautionary account, the landscape architecture community presents it as a business card of the profession, largely detached from how the project circulates in urban theory, housing policy debates, and critiques of displacement. This gap is not incidental. It raises an uncomfortable question about how the discipline understands its own agency.

The High Line does many things well. It improves access, introduces performative planting, offers a new form of urban promenade, and is formally public. At the same time, it produces the very conditions that allow capitalist extraction of public space to flourish. As Sharon Zukin^[1] has argued, the project exemplifies the commodification of authenticity: industrial roughness and post-industrial ecology are converted into lifestyle assets. Jeremiah Moss describes it bluntly as a “viewing platform for real estate”^[2]. David Harvey frames it as accumulation by dispossession^[3], where public investment and cultural value are captured by private capital. And the park’s ecological aesthetics do not really counter these dynamics; they are squarely a part of their operation.

This is less a failure of design quality than a problem of alignment between design ambition and the political economy it serves. Landscape architecture speaks fluently about planetary health and urban ecologies, yet remains strikingly misaligned with the theories that diagnose the political economy shaping its sites. The High Line shows how easily the profession can become detached from social realities when it focuses narrowly on ecological performance and aesthetic refinement, while remaining structurally indifferent to the political economy in which those aesthetics operate.

Phase three is, in its major part, much less hyped, less saturated with detail, more restrained and appears surprisingly austere. The number of elements and materials per square foot is reduced. Vegetation seems less dependent on intensive maintenance regimes. More seems to be achieved with less. In this phase, Field Operations demonstrates a welcome degree of disciplinary restraint by not closing the scene through excess design. The project leaves room for friction, adjacency, and unresolved perception—qualities largely absent from the earlier sections.

Beyond its internal design, this stretch opens views toward the city’s infrastructural interior: subway storage yards, service spaces, logistical landscapes. It exposes other organs of the city beyond the staged ecological utopia. In other words, the final phase retroactively reframes the earlier ones by exposing what their manicured surfaces tried to suppress.

Of course, the underlying neoliberal economic regime remains unchanged. But perceptually, something shifts. The last phase appears less as a curated display and more as a backstage of the city. It withdraws from the perfected image of urban success and places the visitor between realities that market logic paints as separate: hyper-gentrified architecture and the infrastructural necessity of parking lots and train yards. Heatherwick’s Vessel and BIG’s ‘biophilic’ The Spiral, seen from here, appear as gestures competing for popularity within the same extractive field. In this way, the view from the High Line reveals a juxtaposition; not transcending the neoliberal milieu, but binding together perceptually incompatible realities. The effect presents a shift in perception, namely, from immersion to reflection.

What emerges is not an ‘unmasked’ city in any absolute sense. Zukin’s “naked city” gives a comprehensive account of how culture masks power, and reveals the cyclic mechanics of commodification of authenticity that eventually lead to the loss of it. Perceptually, nakedness seems unstable. What one observer experiences as exposure, another reads as yet another mode of staging. I’m not sure if the last phase of the High Line undresses the city, but it does confront different parts of it. It confronts internal contrasts and contradictions. The ‘naked city’ was never so much about a perceptual state but more of an analytical demand. In that sense, the High Line’s phase three introduces perceptual friction that makes masking much less effective.

Talking about the soul of the city, romanticizing grit, dirt, poverty and abandonment is problematic, because this is precisely what capitalism drives on – commodifies it and offers a simulation. Nostalgia is not a strategy^[4]. Cities change and develop. This is precisely the mechanism Sharon Zukin identifies: authenticity becomes a resource, mined and repackaged by capital. The problem is not change itself, but how change is aestheticized to conceal power and appear as a social contribution to a locality.

By placing contradictions in plain view, it produces distance rather than immersion, doubt rather than identification. It makes comparison unavoidable. The city is no longer presented as seamless, harmonious, or resolved. Instead, it appears as a contested assemblage whose tensions cannot be smoothed away by design.

For landscape architecture, this distinction is critical. The question is not how to design better icons or more refined ecological scenes, but how to work with perceptual conditions that resist closure and remain low-resolution. The last phase of the High Line is perceptually productive not because it escapes neoliberal urbanism, but because it loosens the aesthetic regime that normally conceals it. It shows, perhaps unintentionally, that landscape architecture can operate not only by harmonising the city, but by leaving its internal contradictions perceptible.

References