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Every city wants a High Line. When Joshua David and Robert Hammond first dreamed of turning a long-disused elevated railway track overgrown with weeds into a\u00a0linear park for Manhattan, they could scarcely have imagined the day \u2013 about 10 years and more than $180m later \u2013 when fellow urbanists in Miami, Seoul, Toronto, London and Sydney would strive to replicate their project\u2019s phenomenal success.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the High Line\u2019s allure lies in its seeming impossibility,\u201d says Adam Ganser, vice president of planning and design at Friends of the High Line. \u201cIt was so unlikely that this project would happen that I think it provides some optimism around similar crazy concepts in other cities around the world.\u201d The fact that it attracts five million visitors per year and an estimated $980m (\u00a3756m) in tax revenue might also have something to do with it.<\/p>\n
But as major cities fall over each other to adapt the relics of their industrial past into engines of tourism and property booms, the chorus of detractors is growing. The charges against the mini-High Lines of the world are numerous: racial segregation, gentrification, cost, ugliness and outright idiocy. London\u2019s Garden Bridge project\u00a0has just collapsed amid widespread opposition from the very population it hoped to titillate. Even Hammond \u2013 whose penitence included setting up the\u00a0High Line Network, a coalition of designers and planners meant to help other High Line-like \u201cadaptive reuse\u201d projects avoid his mistakes \u2013 acknowledges the problems. \u201cWe were from the community. We wanted to do it for the neighbourhood,\u201d\u00a0he said in a recent interview. \u201cUltimately, we failed.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, how do you do it right?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n