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Social & Cultural Geography Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20 The matter of displacement: a urban ecology of New York City's High Line Darren J. Patricka a Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, HNES 137, 4700 Keele StreetTorontoON M3J 1P3Canada Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Darren J. Patrick , Social & Cultural Geography (2013): The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line, Social & Cultural Geography, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2013.851263 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2013.851263

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The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line

Darren J. Patrick Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, HNES 137, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada, [email protected]

This paper critically gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City’s High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology- turned-homonormative park as a novel form of and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession’, focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing on the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights, this account of the High Line’s redevelopment tracks relations between queers and plants. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.

Key words: gentrification, queer urban ecology, High Line, Ailanthus altissima, New York City, critical urban studies.

Introduction interviews and archival research, my effort is animated by photographic documentation of Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 In this paper, I pursue a queer ecological the vegetal landscape of the abandoned High critique of gay and green gentrification by way Line by the American photographer Joel of considering entanglements of human sexu- Sternfeld. Reading his photographs through ality and more-than-human agencies, specifi- some key analytics of queer ecology, I think cally those of plants. Empirically, I focus on relationally with one of the former botanical the redevelopment of New York City’s High inhabitants of the space, Ailanthus altissima, Line, a 1.45-mile-long (2.33 km) linear urban also known as the Tree of Heaven.1 park or promenade constructed in the for- A. altissima’s biological capacities, along merly abandoned remains of an elevated with its reputation as a so-called nonnative railway on Manhattan’s West Side. Building invasive species, offer some crucial insights on a foundation of semi-structured expert into the political and ethical possibilities of a

q 2013 Taylor & Francis 2 Darren J. Patrick

queered urban ecology. I emphasize both the upholds and sustains them, while promising the material and symbolic role of A. altissima as possibility of a demobilized gay constituency an unruly actor whose ‘success’ as a species is and a privatized, depoliticized gay inseparable from the continual anthropogenic anchored in domesticity and consumption’ production of waste spaces and successional (50). I extend the critique of homonormativity ecological landscapes. I take A. altissima’s to geographic and urban ecological analyses of successional emergence in the abandoned gentrification to demonstrate the political and ecology of the High Line, and its subsequent ethical risks and opportunities of the ‘progress’ erasure from the planned landscape which claimed by organizations such as FoHL. replaced that ecosystem, as both metaphori- From an ecological perspective, even as cally suggestive and literally entangled in the particular ecosystems ‘services’ are beginning preservation-through-redevelopment effort to be ‘valued’ in political-economic terms, A. spearheaded by Friends of the High Line altissima’s ‘success’ in urban areas globally (FoHL), the organization behind the effort to continues to symbolize blight and decay, often ‘save’ the structure from demolition. marking spaces as ripe for redevelopment. I am interested in A. altissima because of its What might have been different if plants such status as an unruly figure, a literal weed, whose as A. altissima had not been erased from presence and adaptive capacities to produce landscape of the High Line? How might an space (i.e., to territorialize) involve (1) a insistence on ecological queerness as a domain geographic expression of its reproductive of responsibility for and to unruly actors process and (2) its quasi-strategic capacity for help to provide political power and ethical ‘self-recognition’ by way of a phenomenon grounding for human inhabitants of cities who called allelopathy. Perhaps uniquely among are opposed to or impacted by gentrification? pioneering plant colonizers of the High Line, A. Finally, what might the destructive territor- altissima challenges us to consider the ways in ializing capacities and successional strategies which nonhuman displacement, in addition to of A. altissima offer to radical queers seeking reproduction and growth, plays an important to critique the success of human organizations role in the politics and ethics of ecological and strategies that use ‘gayness’ to immunize gentrification. Biological and ecological against meaningful political opposition? research on A. altissima retains a certain Building on the history of gay territorializa- heteronormative attention to reproduction tion of New York’s Lower West Side neighbor-

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 (i.e., reprocentricity). Even so, A. altissima’s hoods, FoHL’s political success relied on a reputation as an invasive species has prompted selective and naturalized narrative of succes- further exploration of the so-called ‘secondary sion between waves of gentrifiers. This was metabolic’ processes that contribute to the accomplished, in part, through the prolifer- plant’s success in urban ecologies. I read the ation of images, including Sternfeld’s, and latter alongside homonormativity, a term discourses of ‘urban pastoralism’ (Cataldi popularized by Duggan (2003) to critique the et al. 2012: 369). FoHL’s success in advocating mainstreaming of metropolitan, white, bour- preservation through redevelopment relied not geois, and male gay sexuality in the neoliberal only on a variety of classic neoliberal and era.2 Duggan defines homonormativity as ‘a gentrifying tactics, as the review of literatures politics that does not contest dominant hetero- of gay and green gentrification will demon- normative assumptions and institutions, but strate, but also on an implicit appeal to the A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 3

notion of homonormative urban ecologies in insidious and naturalized urban homonorma- which possibilities for political and ethical tivity (Andersson 2011: 1093–1094). This is linkages between sexuality and urban nature especially urgent where the latter silences or were only expressed within the narrow limits displaces issues of race and racialization, class, set out by the exigencies of capitalist urban and gender by way of embracing white development. In this context, A. altissima metronormative gayness (see Halberstam becomes a spectral figure whose disappearance 2005: Chapter 2). from the ‘revised’ landscape of the High Line My analysis unfolds four sections. First, I bespeaks an insidious tendency to obscure the trace multiple threads of scholarly literature, project’s negative impacts on vulnerable which help to situate the redevelopment of the human communities. High Line as a novel instance of gay and green My analysis of the abandoned landscape of gentrification. With this theoretical scaffold- the High Line deploys queer ecological critique ing in place, I move on to a more substantial rooted in a notion of responsibility to and for account of the history of the site’s redevelop- abandoned urban spaces and the complex ment. My empirical insights demonstrate both entanglements they enable and embody. In the extent to which the High Line’s redevelop- addition to invoking concepts of nonhuman ment exists as a case of gay and green agency (Cloke and Jones 2002, 2003; Jones and gentrification, and the important lacunae that Cloke 2008), I look to the pioneering work of remain if we only deploy literatures addressing Sandilands, who, invoking one of her literary these phenomena in order to understand this interlocutors, calls us to ‘[A]ssume responsi- case. Here, I make an initial gesture toward bility for a place’ by pressing ourselves to ‘look plant geography that I develop more fully in both backward at the burden of its history and the third section, in which I elaborate the forward at our responsibility for those parts of theoretical insights necessary to push the its future that lie under human control’ critique further by considering queer ecology (Grover, quoted in Sandilands 2005). Putting and the agency of nonhuman actors. This a notion of responsibility at the center of a leads, lastly, to an overview of political and temporal development of place, I introduce a ethical possibilities for understanding the grounded set of possibilities for political– complex dynamics of gentrification and ethical engagements of and in queer ecologies. displacement in queer ecological terms. This gesture connects to a more recent

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 specification of the significance of the ‘queer’ in ‘queer ecologies’ offered by Sandilands: ‘If From gay and green gentrification to plant “queer” is to mean anything at all, it must geography include a continual process of displacing the heterosexual couple at the center of the Geographic analyses of gentrification form an ecological universe’ (forthcoming, emphasis important part of the broader trend in Marx- in original). In the case of the High Line, FoHL’s ian/Marxist geography focused on the right to insistence on the ‘gayness’ of the space suggests the city. This well-developed conceptual that, at least in urban contexts, we must be terrain deals directly with the question of attentive to the ways in which ecological who inhabits and produces urban space, how argumentation must displace not just hetero- they come to inhabit it, and under what normativity and its couples, but an increasingly conditions they displace others, in particular 4 Darren J. Patrick

the urban poor and racialized communities, successive waves of gentrification. Where from spaces targeted for redevelopment. structuralist critics of gentrification are too Literature on gentrification is traditionally bent on critiquing the ‘complicity’ of first- divided by production side accounts, epitom- wave gentrifiers with market forces, Caulfield ized by the work of the late Neil Smith (1996, posits that it is perhaps more ironic, rather 2002) and his various collaborators and than complicit, when first-wave gentrifiers are elaborators (Hackworth 2002; Hackworth displaced by the very process in which they are and Smith 2001), and consumption side implicated (627). Drawing on Mikhail Bahk- accounts, emblematized by the work of tin, Henri Lefebvre, and Manuel Castells, Zukin (1982, 1995, 2010) and Ley (1996, Caulfield points to the role that erotic or 2003). On the one hand, production side spectacular excess plays in producing the raw accounts tend to emphasize the role of both the material for uptake by the more familiar, and local and national state in securing the privately more sinister, version of gentrification (626). owned space for private–public development. Caulfield summarizes the argument: On the other hand, consumption side accounts highlight notions of authenticity, re-branding [D]eeply embedded in the landscape of strategies, and cultural dimensions of the right gentrification is an immanent critique of to the city. Broadly, these critiques identify both modernist/capitalist city-building ... the the economic mechanisms and cultural drives relationship among different groups of old city that account for the phenomenon by which neighborhood resettlers may be best understood in those who abandoned central city neighbor- the context of a model of entrepreneurial hoods during the historical era of ‘white flight’ appropriation of marginal cultural practice ... come to reinhabit the very spaces left ‘unma- [C]ultural forces may be vital in shaping urban naged’ in the wake of their departure. Without landscapes, that not only economistic or ‘practical’ wading further into this debate, it should be factors matter. Crucial among these forces in the clear that the dynamics of abandonment and case of resettlement of old city neighborhoods is the the right of return form a core conceptual target desire of certain social actors to elude quotidian of critiques of gentrification. domination, whether by technique or by spectacle While I share the political and scholarly (or by the hegemony of heterosexualism). Their commitment to naming and resisting gentrifi- activity constitutes emancipatory practice of a kind cation, foundational geographic literature that mainstream social science, serenely

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 does not leave much room to analyze sexuality naturalizing existing structures, and Marxian and urban ecology, both of which are central political economy, finding in existing structures a to the High Line’s redevelopment. In short, a monologic totality, are not always well situated to queer ecological politics of gentrification is detect. (1989: 628) lacking. Before elaborating the empirical support for pursuing these connections, I Caulfield’s intervention suggests that both turn to a classic piece by Caulfield (1989) market forces and more recent ‘creative city’ that suggests the limitations of structuralist arguments are inadequate to account for the analyses of gentrification on both the pro- (re)production of urban space and the dis- duction and consumption side. Caulfield placement, direct or otherwise, of those to argues that the desires of gentrifiers must be whom parts of the city were abandoned during considered to be a crucial force driving deindustrialization. Caulfield’s insight opens A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 5

critiques of gentrification to the power of geography in the form of pluralized landscape itself, or, as I will suggest below, to queer geographies (2007a) and his work has the plants, queers, and animals which body lately explored ontological concerns nascent forth a representable landscape. On my in geography (Knopp 2004, 2007b). In reading, the High Line’s pre-development contrast to his earlier work on gay gentrifica- landscape, or, more pointedly, its queer tion (1990, 1992), which emphasized how ecology, becomes a source of both the excess gays, particularly ,4 were enrolled in by which gentrification (and, by extension, the survival of urban capitalism, Knopp has urban capitalism) reproduces itself and the increasingly put both actor-network theory immanent critique by which the same process (ANT; Whatmore 2002) and nonrepresenta- may be more thoroughly subverted. In light of tional theory (Thrift 2005, 2008) into con- more recent efforts to analyze gay and green versation in queer geographical terms. gentrification, Caulfield’s prescient, if partial, Nevertheless, he has remained strongly, if not invocation of notions of landscape and desire centrally, concerned with ‘queer quests for suggests a moment of the urban in which identity’ (Knopp 2004) even as queer theorists perverse nature of a weedy ecology and and feminists interested in many of the same deviant sexuality of a queer cruising space ontological and biopolitical questions push for come together to rebuff the falsely creative alternate framings of politics in terms of homogeneity of even the most apparently multispecies engagements (Giffney and Hird progressive forms gentrification.3 2008) and micropolitical/affective scales For this claim to carry weight in a queer (Chisholm 2010), and emphasize impercept- ecological critique, it is important to situate ibility (Grosz 2005), rather than the visibility our understanding of particular forms of and the taxonomic tendencies of identity desire, most notably a desire for gay and politics. green neighborhoods and urban spaces, in Knopp’s hopeful forecast for the outcomes terms of the critical scholarship on gentrifica- of these engagements is ‘a geography that is tion. Here I turn to literatures of both less arrogant and elitist, more hopeful than sexuality and space and, more recently, of fear-driven, more possibilistic than determi- ecological gentrification. Building on founda- nistic, and more human (and humane) than tional works (Bell and Valentine 1995; inhuman (and inhumane)’ (2007a, 27–28). Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter 1997) and While I am sympathetic to Knopp’s vision,5 I

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 their elaboration in extended debates am perhaps most interested in his notion that, (Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007), investi- considered through the ‘ecologies of place’6 gations of the social coproduction of sexuality explored in nonrepresentational theory or the and space have become relatively mainstream ‘weak ontologies’ of ANT, ‘queer quests for in critical human geography. Among many identity’ suggest that queers have ‘ambivalent vibrant contributions to this subfield, Knopp’s relationships to place and identity’ and work stands out not only as charting its ‘affection for placelessness and movement’ development over time, but also for investi- (2004, 129). Adopting this direction, we must gating material and ontological concerns be careful to pay close attention to the real related to the spatial entanglement of humans material relationships of ecological configur- and more-than-human actors. Further, Knopp ations. While ecology does not provide a has emphasized the pluralization of gay and template for either ethics or politics, it 6 Darren J. Patrick

certainly lends itself to mobilization of spaces (629–630). While Dooling does not creative concepts of resistance immanent to a give an exclusively humanist definition of the relational mode of ecological attention to term, she carefully limits her concern to the urban spatial politics. deployment of ‘an environmental ethic’ in In this case, FoHL relied on decidedly non- which ecology signals both a commitment to relational representations of both place and low-impact development and a scientific identity in their melancholic attachment to attentiveness to the nonhuman aspects of and institutional interpretation of the aban- urban ecosystems (630). Given the differences doned landscape of the High Line. Even as the between her case and the High Line, I am project grew into a multibillion-dollar real primarily interested in her claim that ‘ecologi- estate development effort, FoHL self-con- cal gentrification relocates gentrification sciously emphasized an approach which within the environmental discourses and in fused metropolitan sexuality with urban the discourses related to the exclusionary pastoralism in order to naturalize a hitherto aspects of public spaces’ (631). No doubt, the unimaginable transformation of both the High ecological argument for preserving the High Line itself, and the character and economics of Line as a green space was a tactic to quell the surrounding neighborhood. Recalling potential opposition to its impact on afford- Caulfield, this convergence may be more able housing, for instance, on the basis that the ironic than complicit, but, in either case, a project was a giant leap forward in both queer ecological approach suggests that it and in the greening of a can—and even must—pay close attention to formerly industrial, gritty, and sexualized area the reconfigured ecology of the High Line. If, of the city. as both the anecdotal and archival evidence Bunce’s (2009) insights into the convergence suggests, metropolitan sexuality is a primary of sustainability and gentrification in Toronto referent for the aesthetic of the space, what are are expanded upon by Quastel (2009), who the political and ethical implications of the offers Vancouver as a prime case study for particular landscape which emerges as a result considering political ecologies of gentrification. of emphasizing this dimension of the struc- Perhaps coming closest to a queer ecological ture’s history? And what of its occlusions and critique of urban spatial politics, Ingram (2010) erasures? advocates an adaptation of landscape ecology to My interest in the displacement of a queer describe and analyze queer uses of public space

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 ecology by a homonormative ecology differs in Vancouver. Ingram’s work aligns with the from the notion of ecological gentrification queer ecological analysis that I will develop in lately explored by geographers (Bunce 2009; the final section. All of these efforts might be Dooling 2009; Quastel 2009). These authors read as consonant, if not explicitly engaged, detail specifically ecological arguments and with earlier work by While, Jonas, and Gibbs policies fashioned to drive gentrification, (2004), who put forward the notion of a though they have so far avoided textured ‘sustainability fix’ as the ‘selective incorporation relational analyses of more-than-human ecol- of environmental goals’ into various processes ogies. Dooling (2009) coined the term of urban governance, regulation, and neoliberal ‘ecological gentrification’ to critique the state restructuring (552). displacement of homeless people in Seattle These authors hold a common understand- on the basis of ecological redesign of city green ing of urban as a set of A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 7

development, planning, and political proble- Atchison (2008) point. This is to say nothing matics related to the ever more emphasized of queer space. imperative for cities to grow sustainably. The work of the plants, to which Sander- Primarily in response to discourses that relate Regier (2009) attributes a form of agency the rapid urbanization of the planet to the expressed as activity or ‘by virtue of being impacts of global warming, the ruling classes alive’ (69), has lately become the concern of a clearly find themselves under pressure to variety of authors writing under the umbrella articulate pro-growth positions in terms of plant geography (those cited above, as well ideologically immunized against environmen- as Cloke and Jones 2002, 2003; Heynen 2006; tal critique. Critics of ecological gentrification Jones and Cloke 2008). Sander-Regier focuses and capitalist proponents of green growth on the production of abundance and excess as seem to agree, however, that urban environ- a strategy of survival for plants, eventually ments must be adapted for a future laden with feeding a concept of the ‘ethics of partnership’ deep anxieties about environmental and social based on Lorraine Johnson’s notion of change. Nevertheless, the impasse revealed by reciprocity, which is rooted in openness and this debate deals with the decidedly human mutual cultivation (2009: 80). Most interest- displacements endemic to gentrification. ingly, her understanding of weeds is sensitive In this paper, I respond as much to the trend to the irony that a weed often ‘initially serves a toward networked ontologies evidenced in desirable purpose, yet with time and incessant Knopp’s work on sexuality as I do to emerging activity, the plant becomes invasive and ecologics of gentrification. I do so with a undesirable’ (70). By emphasizing the recur- particular interest in a case where an sive temporality of weediness, Sander-Regier abandoned ecology is reshaped by queer and reveals the process of dislocation which vegetal actors, an interest that lends itself to subtends the disjunction between an ecology one last set of touchstones in the literature: of desire and a desirable ecology. plant geography. Hitchings (2003) emphasizes Extending Sander-Regier’s analysis of pri- the relationality of desires and the concomi- vate gardening to the abandoned ecology and tant cultivation of desired plants while cruising space of the High Line, I understand exploring plant agency in the private garden an ecology of desire as reflective of relations of (107). Looking toward ANT, Hitchings mutual benefit and attraction between human gestures toward the aspiration to ‘trace and more-than-human figures. A desirable

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 wider, unstable performances of power that ecology, on the other hand, tips the relation reconfigure the ways in which we understand toward the human, objectifying or instrumen- gardens’ (111). Largely concerned with meth- talizing the vegetal as a component of the odology, Hitchings subverts the visual by landscape that lends itself to management for focusing on the multisensory impact of plants human reproductive ends. As in Caulfield’s in their relations with gardeners (Hitchings description of first-wave gentrifiers, initial and Jones 2004: 15). This work identifies attraction to particular areas of the city important dimensions of the plant’s role in suggests a desire to escape homogenization. ontologies of desire for particular kinds of The irony of appropriations of often ‘gritty’ domesticated nature, but it is not clear that neighborhoods is that they clear the way for such investigations speak to the politics of the same homogenizing forces which they urban space, a limitation to which Head and sought to escape in the first place. But where 8 Darren J. Patrick

Sander-Regier writes about gardeners and develop residential on the formerly their gardens, and Caulfield writes about industrial lots freed by the elimination of the gentrifiers and their neighborhoods, I High Line overhead. The achievement of am writing about an abandoned and transi- zoning variances sent a strong message to tional space which is part garden, part other High Line owners that con- underdetermined pleasure ground, part neigh- demnation and demolition would be the best borhood, part postindustrial, part public, part way to profit from otherwise very limited private. Across time, this queer urban ecology development opportunities for single-story shaped and was shaped by the actions and lots located under the structure. Such devel- desires of cruisers, gentrifiers, and plants, each opment pressure encouraged the Chelsea displacing and being displaced by the other in Property Owners—a vocal group led by various modes of anomalous relation. Edison Properties CEO Jerry Gottesman—to push for condemnation and demolition at City Hall. Their justification for demolition was the History of the High Line’s redevelopment apparent public safety threat posed by the decaying structure and its ‘unsavory’ sur- The High Line was originally erected between roundings. Defeat appeared inevitable when, 1929 and 1934 as part of the West Side in his last days in office in 2001, Mayor Rudy Improvement, a Robert Moses led plan for Giuliani signed a demolition order. industrial and infrastructural development. Two years earlier, in 1999, Joshua David Following its industrial fallowing in 1980, the and Robert Hammond, two white, bourgeois, railway, which runs both through and along- gay men, met at a Community Board meeting side by-then abandoned or converted indus- concerning the fate of the structure. The pair trial buildings, remained difficult to access and would soon cofound FoHL, which was able to almost completely unmaintained by Conrail/ combine legal action with political brokerage CSX, its private owner. During nearly three to halt demolition and push for preservation decades of abandonment, the space came to be through redevelopment. FoHL is now the only home to a weedy ecosystem inhabited by more not-for-profit organization to license the right than seventy-five plant species (New York City to operate a publicly owned park in New York Department of City Planning 2005, Appendix City. During his time as Executive Director, C), a bevy of urban animals (Foster 2010),7 Hammond came to be more well compensated

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 and a range of human uses, including queer than Adrian Benepe, former Commissioner of sex and cruising, artistic production, encamp- the New York City Department of Parks and ment, and drug use. Recreation (Kovaleski 2009). In 2010, FoHL In 1991, a five-block section south of listed eighty-four people on its staff to manage Gansevoort Street was torn down over the and operate a 6.7-acre park (12.5 staff per objection of community activists (first-wave/ acre). Compared to the Friends Hudson River pioneer gentrifiers, see Smith 1996) who had Park and the Hudson River Park Trust been moving into abandoned factories and combined (17 staff for 550 acres ¼ 0.03 lofts on the Far West Side. Despite promises to staff per acre), the Central Park Conservancy the contrary, Rockrose Development Corpor- (367 staff for 843 acres ¼ 0.4 staff per acre), ation, which owns the sites, eventually sought or the Prospect Park Alliance (263 staff for and obtained zoning variances to 585 acres ¼ 0.44 staff per acre), the High Line A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 9

is the most highly staffed park per acre in New Hammond resourcefully assembled a group of York City.8 Beyond the costs of staffing, the pro-development experts, neoliberal consult- park’s per square foot operating costs are also ants, powerful figures in real estate develop- the highest of any in New York City (Calder ment, and a bevy of celebrities to aid in 2009). crafting their redevelopment strategy.10 This After ten years of planning and advocacy glittering group easily overshadowed FoHL’s work, the first two phases of the three-phase community-based supporters, though the project opened in 2009 and 2011 at a latter remain an important source of funding combined cost of $152 million (New York and public relations support.11 FoHL’s early City Department of Parks and Recreation efforts are too detailed to recount here,12 but it 2009). The third phase is slated to open in is important to note that its emphasis on 2014 at an estimated cost of $90 million, building high-level support through recruit- making the total capital construction costs of ment of powerful developers, politicians, and the park close to $250 million (Debucquoy- celebrities breaks with more ‘quaint’ forms of Dodley 2012). The project claims to have Jane Jacob’s style community activism spurred nearly $2 billion in real estate (Herman 2009), let alone radical politics. It development through the zoning compromise is hardly surprising that such a coalition came crucial to the formation of the park to support the organization so quickly in light (McGeehan 2011). The New York City of its avowedly pro-business disposition and Economic Development Corporation (NYC professed political neutrality regarding gentri- EDC 2011) indicates that, prior to the park’s fication (David and Hammond 2011: 10, 55). redevelopment, ‘surrounding residential prop- But the High Line’s success is not only about erties were valued eight per cent below the money. As Hammond pointed out in a 2012 overall median for Manhattan’. By 2011, the interview preceding an event called ‘Behind value of property within a five-minute walk of the Bushes: The Secret Homo History of the the park had increased by 103 per cent (NYC High Line’,13 FoHL relied on a strong EDC 2011: 2). Such statistics demonstrate the connection to gay aspects of the project. ‘The challenges for smaller-scale business owners, High Line is totally gay’, said Hammond apartment renters, and residents of public (quoted in Pipenburg 2012). In addition to housing near the High Line to maintain their noting that the High Line runs through foothold in the neighborhood, to say nothing Chelsea, which, next to Hell’s Kitchen, is

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 of the cruisers. Manhattan’s most established gay neighbor- While these facts begin to bespeak the hood, he pointed out that ‘The core part of unevenness of resources and funding accorded [FoHL’s] early supporters were gay people’. to the High Line in comparison to other parks, These were not just any gay people, they were they do not tell the whole story of how the people like legendary artist AA Bronson, High Line came to be a powerful gentrifying lesbian City Councilperson and future speaker force. For this, we will look to alliances forged of the City Council, Christine Quinn, and the not only around the idea of redevelopment, flamboyant and famed restaurateur Florent but also with the queer ecology of the High Morellet, whose eponymous diner ironically Line’s postindustrial landscape. Related to the closed in 2008 due to rising real estate values former, and owing to their confessed ignor- preceding the opening of the park. These ance of urban spatial politics,9 David and supporters, many of whom already inhabited 10 Darren J. Patrick

positions of political or cultural power or order for the ‘creative class’ to claim success in privilege, were drawn upon for their ability to their revitalization efforts. fund the project or to provide political or Organizations such as the LGBTQ (lesbian, cultural capital to the FoHL’s effort. Their gay, bisexual, , and queer)14 youth- implication in a gentrifying process had far of-color group Fabulous Independent Edu- less impact on their material survival than on cated Radical for Community Empowerment those in more tenuous circumstances. (FIERCE!), which has a long history of When probed further on the connection sociospatial justice activism on Manhattan’s between gays and redevelopment, Hammond West side,15 remain critical of the undemo- offered the following explanation: cratic neoliberal approach to privately led public space development, including the High I believe gays have an ability to see beauty in places Line. They identify an enormous contradiction other people might find repellent or unattractive. It in the provision of tens of millions of public was easier for gays to see potential in the High Line. dollars to a ‘gay’-park-cum-speculative-real- They were more willing to support a crazy dream. It estate venture even as queer youth of color goes back to Richard Florida and his concept of the have been fighting for affordable housing, creative class, this theory that gays are vital to access of medical services, and opportunities neighborhoods because they see something special in for employment, all while resisting police them that real estate agents may not. (Pipenburg 2012) profiling and violence in the symbolic center of queer New York. Indeed, while the High Line’s Invoking the neoliberal avatar Richard Flor- gayness is invoked as a cultural ‘value added’ ida, Hammond opens up FoHL to critiques of according to the logic of the creative class, the Florida’s ignorance of the urban poor (Wilson reality of the project’s uneven impact on the and Keil 2008) which identify ‘creativity’ as an queer community, itself differentiated along overdetermined category that obscures socio- racialized, classed, and gendered lines, is spatially exclusionary impacts of policies powerfully obscured by such pinkwashed undertaken to lure the so-called creative class statements as ‘The High Line is totally gay’. back to central-city neighborhoods. More This is to say nothing of the fact that the immediately relevant for my interest in the redevelopment of the High Line and sub- entanglement of sexuality and nature, Ham- sequent influx of millions of tourists to the mond’s response also implicates FoHL in neighborhood has commercialized, securi-

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 critiques of homonormativity (Duggan 2003) tized, and all but destroyed one of the last and metronormativity (Halberstam 2005)in zones of public sexuality in Manhattan in the which white gay men are hegemonically name of good, gay, and green development.16 overrepresented in (urban) spatial politics, provided they are conversant in the depoliti- cizing discourses of good gay citizenship (Bell From critiques of gentrification to queer and Binnie 2004). If we accept that ‘gays are urban ecologies vital to neighborhoods’ such as the one re- branded by the High Line redevelopment, then Queer ecological critique of both gay and green we must also realize that bodies marked as gentrification has important referents in the abject, particularly queers of color and the foregoing literature, specifically—an assump- urban poor, are all too frequently displaced in tion of a consequential relationship between A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 11

sexual difference and regimes of urban spatial political concepts that can link sexuality and and ecological management—a temporal under- ecology as they operate in discursive strategies, standing of place which takes seriously the human subjectivities, and ecological process. ‘entanglements of relationality and consequent To be sure, Gandy’s survey of both ecological affective politics and ethics’ (Jones and Cloke and geographic theory shows us that there is a 2008: 87) and, relatedly, the need for specifi- long way to go in making this work relevant to cally queer relational figures, such as particular geographers and consonant with the current plants, which trouble our accounts of agency, limits of urban ecological science. Recalling action, and responsibility to and for anthro- Knopp’s intervention, my effort here attempts a pogenic urban ecologies. Queer ecological specific conceptual link between a particular critique builds on the foundational work of plant in a particular sociohistorical configur- Sandilands (2002, 2005, 2008; Sandilands and ation of urban nature. My primary aim is to Erickson 2010) and borrows insights from the attend to the political and ethical possibilities more recent and limited speculations of that issue forth when we pay close attention to geographer Gandy (2012). While neither has the specific material and symbolic role of both invoked queer ecology to critique gentrification human and nonhuman actors in urban space. I per se, Sandilands has developed a powerful see the development of an ethics of responsi- analysis of the biopolitics of bility as a necessary first step toward a queer and reprocentricity in , while urban ecology in which the proliferation of Gandy (2012) combines Foucault’s and creative concepts might prove useful to existing Lefebvre’s notions of heterotopic alliance and efforts to oppose spatial injustices of gentrifica- heterotopy, respectively, in order to ground an tion. For this to carry weight, we must traffic interest queer urban spaces understood as between the determinate and determining ‘unruly’, ‘ruderal’, and ‘anomalous’ (734). aspects of particular urban contexts while not Gandy asks: ‘How far can be underestimating the transformative and inde- usefully or meaningfully extended beyond the terminate capacities of ‘unconventional’ realm of sexuality to the study of complexity, actors. indeterminacy, and new models of scientific Bringing a notion of responsibility to bear explanation more generally’ (742)? Gandy on the redevelopment of the High Line invites concludes by arguing that queer ecology is a return to the abandoned ecology of the most theoretically intriguing when it is ‘beyond space. FoHL’s own initial attachment to the

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 language, beyond the bounded human subject, space was ironically predicated on the charis- and thus far largely beyond spatial theory itself’ matic assemblage of queers and plants, now (742). While I find many affinities with Gandy’s replaced by a highly managed, labor-intensive interest in the anomalous, ruderal, and ecosystem in which basic interactions between indeterminate aspects of queer urban ecologies, humans and plants are circumscribed I think his positioning of queer ecology (Figure 1). Whereas the abandoned ecology ‘beyond’ spatial theory overemphasizes the of the High Line offered a space for under- divide between the territorializing practices of determined interspecies interactions—sex human agents (i.e., proper ‘subjects’) and ‘behind the bushes’, for example—FoHL’s nonhuman actors. As I outlined in the emphasis on management, development, and introduction, queer ecology calls our attention economic success demands both more social to the urgent task of developing ethical and and ecological control over the space. FoHL 12 Darren J. Patrick

the space as a park. These particular images depict A. altissima, which, with its reputation as an ‘aggressive’, invasive species with a strong affinity for ‘disturbed’ ecologies, suggests immanent vegetal critiques of the purified discourses of preservation and sus- tainability advocated by FoHL. Encountering the High Line’s abandoned17 ecology through Sternfeld’s photos transgresses FoHL’s narra- tive of success by emphasizing the extent to which the planned landscape performs material erasures of unruly species and activities from the High Line’s past even as it invokes their characteristics in its design. Of course, Sternfeld’s photos also play a signifi- cant role in purifying the landscape of its Figure 1 Signage throughout the park animals and queer uses by depicting a space implores visitors to avoid walking (or doing free of non-plant figures, without any human anything else) behind the bushes. Photo by sex. Nothing seems to be going on behind author. these bushes. This move emphasizes the extent to which the park’s carefully curated plants invoke a queer aesthetic of abandonment only rewrites the ecology of the High Line into to foreclose any possibility of articulating, for dominant discourses and practices of gentrifi- instance, a pro-public sex stance which argues cation, rendering plants as inert objects and for the provision of spaces in which such queers as normative subjects whose ‘excessive’ activities could be undertaken safely and even desires always risk capture by an urban with aesthetic enhancement. capitalism incapable of producing its own As Cataldi et al. (2012) analyze in detail, surpluses. Sternfeld’s photographs have a complex and In order to take more seriously the notion ambivalent relationship to the High Line that the abandoned High Line’s queer and redevelopment. On the one hand, they were

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 vegetal inhabitants and activities might crucial to galvanizing support for the project suggest an immanent, if anachronistic, critique despite the artist’s preference for ‘maintaining of homonormative gentrification, we will need the High Line in its 2000–2001 [abandoned] to look more closely at the ways in which state’ (362). On the other, they serve ‘as plants were enrolled in the political, economic, floating signifiers and design elements, and social discourses and practices of redeve- divorced from the material conditions of lopment. For this, I turn to the iconic maintenance labor, public and industrial photographs of the abandoned space taken transportation’ (368). Focusing largely on the by landscape photographer Joel Sternfeld aestheticization of the space, Cataldi et al. (Figures 2 and 3). Sternfeld’s images of the offer a searing critique that points to many of High Line’s abandoned ecology played a the elements that I have discussed above, crucial, yet ambivalent, role in redeveloping including the relationship of the High Line to A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 13

Figure 2 ‘Ailanthus Trees, 25th Street, May 2000’, Joel Sternfeld. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013

Figure 3 ‘Looking South at 27th Street, September 2000’, Joel Sternfeld. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. 14 Darren J. Patrick

gentrification, queer space, and post-9/11 remain perpetually unfinished, sustaining security regimes (369–371). I pick up on the emergent growth and change over time. (FoHL critique of landscape representation offered by 2004) Cataldi et al. while being careful to attend to the destruction of the High Line’s abandoned The jury, which included Robert Hammond, landscape in terms that are sensitive not only chose this design for its sensitivity to the High to the human aspects of the ecosystem but also Line’s plants and landscape (David and to the more-than-human aspects. The import- Hammond 2011: 75–77). Symbolic reverence ant point is that, even if problematically, to the original inhabitants bespeaks a queer Sternfeld’s photos afford us imaginative access desire for maintaining melancholic attach- to a charismatic landscape and its particular ments to disturbed urban ecologies of the inhabitants in a moment when the apparently bygone ‘gay ghetto’ even as they are reworked, desirable ecology of the redesigned High Line displaced, and sanitized. Yet, the design team’s obscures and covers over the dynamics of the description leaves no ambiguity regarding the ecology of desire on which it is based. proper work to be performed by the figures As the Chairman of the Board of Directors populating the High Line’s ecology. The team said in a personal interview, Sternfeld’s photos handily enfolds the queer (‘unruly’, ‘intimate’, proved to be a ‘very powerful’ tool for creating ‘strange character’) with the vegetal (‘nature’, the High Line brand and for stimulating a ‘wild’, ‘cultivated’, ‘plant life’) in the context ‘remarkably brilliant execution’ of the of neoliberal pressures for sustainable devel- designed landscape (J. Alschuler, Chairman opment (‘flexibility and responsiveness’, ‘per- of the Board of Directors of the FoHL, petually unfinished, sustaining emergent Personal Interview, 18 April 2011). The growth and change over time’). The team official submission of the winning design makes the very condition of abandonment the team makes this explicit: basis for their design, embracing a mode of city building in which both unruly nature and Inspired by the melancholic, unruly beauty of the deviant sexuality are perversely invoked to High Line, where nature has reclaimed a once-vital stimulate development. In this vision, the High piece of urban infrastructure, the team retools this Line’s queers and plants (indeed, the animals industrial conveyance into a post-industrial seem to be lost in this narrative) carry more instrument of leisure, life, and growth. By freight than the structure itself ever did. By

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 changing the rules of engagement between plant seeking to ‘change the rules of engagement life and pedestrians, our strategy of agri-tecture between plant life and pedestrians’, the design combines organic and building materials into a team reveals a limited scope of acceptable blend of changing proportions that accommodates modes of engagement with plant life in the the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the hyper- park. Indeed, figuring all the park’s users as social. In stark contrast to the speed of Hudson ‘pedestrians’ signifies that the space is River Park, this parallel linear experience is marked unfriendly to the kinds of intimate and by slowness, distraction and an other-worldliness anomalous encounters enabled by the louche that preserves the strange character of the High landscape of the abandoned High Line. Line. Providing flexibility and responsiveness to the Instead, the design puts the landscape as a changing needs, opportunities, and desires of the whole into the service of ‘sustaining emergent dynamic context, our proposal is designed to growth and change over time’. A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 15

Accordingly, ‘plant selection [for the park] dustrial urban natures. Here it is useful to focuses on native, drought-tolerant, and low- discuss some of A. altissima’s characteristics maintenance species’ which are arranged and entanglements with broader processes of according to ‘naturally-created plant commu- urbanization. A. altissima, or the Tree of nities’ that occurred in the self-seeded land- Heaven as it commonly known, was originally scape. These choices are justified on the basis introduced to North America in 1784 by that they minimize resources (FoHL 2013). William Hamilton of Philadelphia (Shah 1997: The role of plants as ‘native value added’ 22). Native to China, it is now found on every belies FoHL’s claims of constructing the continent besides Antarctica, a diffusion that ‘world’s longest greenroof’ even as it obscures has helped it earn a classification as a so-called the reality that, prior to redevelopment, exotic invasive species in many places, includ- virtually no resources were required to ing parts of New York State. maintain the space even as it provided British nature writer Richard Mabey (2010) valuable ecological services. While the con- points out that, ‘In New York it’s already clear tinuation of unmanaged succession18 might that just a few months of neglect by city have posed some measurable, but mitigable, maintenance teams would lead to the streets risks to the stability of the structure itself, it is becoming a burgeoning forest of Chinese tree- clear that the exigencies of surplus value of-heaven seedlings’ (237–238). Mabey goes extraction took priority over any notion of on to describe how the sight of this charismatic responsibility to or for the existing ecology tree on the High Line influenced desires to and the relations it supported and enabled. preserve the space as a park. What he does not Sustainability is quite limited in this formu- discuss is that the very tree that populated the lation, pertaining only to the ‘natural’ abandoned landscape would ironically be elements of the space, while leaving the displaced by the very transformation in which gentrifying impact of redevelopment on it was implicated. Quite suggestively, Mabey adjacent neighborhoods unaddressed as part follows his brief nod to the High Line with a of the project’s ecologic. Externalization of passage on the proliferation of the tree in politically contentious impacts of the redeve- Detroit. There, in the paradigmatic epicenter of lopment deploys plants and queers in the postindustrial ‘decay’, Mabey suggests that construction of a desirable ecology, thereby ‘Young people from all over America—musi- naturalizing the displacement of both human cians, Green activists, social pioneers—are

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 and nonhuman inhabitants of the space under flooding into the abandoned areas, keen to the guise of an ecologic of succession. In other experiment with new patterns of urban living words, queers and plants, and eventually the which accept nature—including its weedy public, are permitted access on the condition frontiersmen—rather than attempting to drive that they yield to appropriately normative it out’ (239). A. altissima has a strong affinity for visions of redeveloping the space for the the same kinds of spaces that draw subjectivities purposes of unlimited growth and capitalist frequently implicated in gentrification of post- reproduction. industrial urban areas. Recalling Caulfield, we In light of its absence from the redesigned can begin to see a parallel attraction to specific landscape, A. altissima offers an immanent ecological niches expressed by A. altissima and potential for queer-cum-vegetal resistance to by urban gentrifiers, the latter being far more gentrification and redevelopment of postin- selective than the former. Here we can ask what 16 Darren J. Patrick

would happen if we made more political room space of capital might support a politics of for the ‘succession’ of the former rather than the anti-gentrification. Is this an ecology worth ‘success’ of the latter. saving? Turning to the behavioral ecology of A. Here it is important to distinguish between altissima reveals some striking creative possi- the form of displacement initiated by gentri- bilities. Among the many qualities that make fication and the ongoing ontological reality of A. altissima a highly successful plant is displacement wrought through the incessant allelopathy, or the production of the so-called relational interactivities of the material world. ‘secondary metabolites’ which ‘have no Here I invoke Cloke and Jones (2002), who apparent role in life processes or plant advocate for an understanding of tree agency, structure’ (Heisey 1997: 28). While not fully and, indeed, material agency more broadly, understood, allelopathy is a plant capacity that is sensitive not only to ‘the very differing excessive to reproduction. A. altissima pro- forms of beings and processes’ in which such duces a variety of chemicals that are believed agencies are articulated, ‘but also the very to be capable of inhibiting the growth of other differing velocities and rhythms they might be plants in areas immediately surrounding an operating in’ (87). Such a call suggests that a A. altissima tree (Lawrence, Colwell, and queer ecological critique of the High Line as Sexton 1991). While this tactic is not uniformly gentrification should be at least as concerned successful, it has contributed to A. altissima’s with time as with space. Indeed, looking to the localized success even as it has helped it earn a lost elements of the High Line’s abandoned reputation as an unruly and unmanageable ecology, such as A. altissima, helps us to biopolitical presence in urban ecosystems. understand the displacement of that ecology as While allelopathy is too complex a process a loss worthy of both ethical and political to describe in greater detail here, we can begin consideration. Perhaps the spatial tactics to explore some political and ethical impli- deployed by FoHL might be countered by a cations of attending to specific plant capacities temporal resistance, which advocates for a in a queer ecological critique of gentrification. responsibility to allow ecologies that emerge in I read A. altissima’s allelopathic capacity as abandoned spaces to continuously determine differently temporalized process of displace- the conditions of their own emergence. This ment. Echoing Sandiland’s argument about the amounts to an argument for nonintervention meaning of ‘queer’ being linked to displacing or minimal intervention in abandoned spaces

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 the heteronormative couple, I consider on specifically ecological grounds. Such argu- A. altissima to be a queering agent on the ments regarding the imperative to protect abandoned High Line. Specifically, A. altis- ‘fragile’ ecologies in urbanized and anthro- sima not only reproduces itself sexually, it also pogenic environments are far from politically relies on territorializing tactics excessive to its neutral. If critics of gentrification attended strictly reproductive functions. If we could more closely to both the human and nonhu- imagine queer human users of the space man sexuality, materiality, and symbolic engaging in an analogous process through production at the heart of gay and green their transgressive patterns of use (sex and gentrification, they might find alternative cruising), it seems possible to suggest a form of sources for disrupting the perverse logic of queer human/nonhuman alliance in which the displacement. Rather than submitting the anti-normative displacement of a scripted process to the overdetermined elements of A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 17

dominant regimes of capitalist space-making, green gentrification. Recall Sandiland’s notion a queer ecological critique of gentrification of responsibility to and for the weight of foregrounds underdetermined elements as a historical destructions and displacements source of potential tactics and terms for a undertaken in the name of (re)producing a renewed anti-gentrification politics. heteronatural order. The High Line context is one in which nonnormative or counter- normative queer lives— and forms of life— Conclusion are systematically attacked and undervalued because they are not apparently (re)pro- With A. altissima as my guide, I have explored ductive. Perhaps now we can begin to imagine the ground on which political consideration of a specifically queer resistance to homonorma- human–plant relationality might begin to tive gentrification on the basis of both challenge dominant modes of urban develop- historical communities of sexual difference ment. Of course, it is easy to fetishize the and nascent theories of urban ecology, which radical potential of queer figures and derelict emphasize the material and symbolic spaces as engines of difference and radical exchanges that shape historical configurations possibility. Let me be clear: I do not take queer of matter and energy in anthropogenic ecologies to be inherently resistant to the environments. Rather than seeing the land- vicissitudes of urban capitalism. Nevertheless, scape as a ‘merely’ passive ground, we must with all of the irony suggested by Caulfield, I trace the movement and relational activity take the desire expressed by FoHL to honor immanent to a queer ecology of desire not only and preserve the High Line seriously enough to engage multiple agencies, but also to learn to wonder whether it could have staged a tactics, if not strategies, for creating spaces in politics in which plants were called to do which the imperative of capitalist redevelop- anything other than serve gentrifying ends. A. ment is suspended long enough so that we altissima is an intriguing figure on account of might genuinely engage alternative modes of allelopathic capacity to relate to its environ- being. If urban queers attended more closely to ment and to create a space in which it can the ecological dynamics of the spaces so often flourish despite severe limitations of vital ephemerally reclaimed for sociosexual pur- resources. Its success is deeply related to the poses, they might begin to find compelling ongoing tendency of humans to create highly figures with whom to ally both politically and

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 disturbed ecologies in the midst of profoundly ethically. In so doing, they might denaturalize anthropogenic spaces. In other words, its discourses of invasiveness associated with ‘natural’ success is linked in complex ways to figures such as A. altissima, whose ability to our ‘cultural’ failures. If we foreground a thrive in disturbed ecologies is directly related relational responsibility for such spaces, it to the political and ethical conditions in which hardly seems ethical that A. altissima should such ecologies are coproduced by humans. bear the weight of being demonized as invasive Returning to Cloke and Jones (2003), our when the very conditions for its survival are ability and willingness to take relational intertwined with the forms and structures of ecologies seriously as scholars or activists urbanization in late capitalism. depends on our ability as humans to imagine Here I can begin to suggest the ethico- an ethics conditioned more by the opportunity political outlines of queer resistance to gay and to appreciate, cultivate, or work with existing 18 Darren J. Patrick

assemblages than by the imperative to intervene part of a series of panels on human–plant on an anthropocentrically instrumental basis. geographies. Many thanks to Dr Jenny Atch- Situating ourselves within dynamic ecologies ison, Dr Kathleen Buckingham, Dr Lesley Head, begins to unsettle understandings of phenom- and Dr Catherine Phillips for organizing that ena such as displacement, which can be series and for their hard work and motivation in understood as an incessant ontological reality. completing this special issue. I appreciate the Far from naturalizing displacement—a move insightful comments povided by the three that would complicate any anti-gentrification anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of politics—this move marks queer ecological this paper and the generosity of Luhring awareness as a fundamental part of any such Augustine Gallery in New York City for politics. Here, queerness displaces both hetero- providing permission to use Joel Sternfeld’s normative and homonormative forms of photos. Finally, special thanks to the many identity whose reproduction is predicated on friends, mentors, comrades, and colleagues socionatural destructions and endless repro- whose comments and insights supported, duction of the same associated with the challenged, and shaped the ideas presented homogenized landscapes of gentrification. The here. No author is alone in their thinking or goal of a queer ecological critique of gentrifica- writing; I am enormously lucky to have such tion is neither to pluralize nor to proliferate insightful and warm company. vogue queer identities, a process which we have seen can too easily be co-opted. Instead it Notes engages in responsible consideration of the many contingent ecological factors required to 1. My initial fieldwork involved sixteen expert and sustain any apparently stable and reproducible community activist interviews, and substantial form of identity. Rather than taking displace- archival and media research. Subsequently, I have ment to be an arrestable phenomenon, queer continued archival and media research paying particular attention to emergent popular critiques urban ecology asks what must be displaced in of the park’s imbrication with ongoing gentrification order to affirm the emergence of any particular of the surrounding neighborhoods. In both endea- space. The life that abounds in queer urban vors, accounts of the power of landscape led me to ecologies offers us a complex material-discur- considerations of the more-than-human aspects of sive opportunity for new ethico-political the development of the park. alliances with nonhumans. The challenge, 2. See also Stryker (2008) for more on the history and uses of this term. Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 then, is to ensure that such alliances subvert 3. See Wylie (2007) for important expansions on the incessant demands to reproduce ‘successfully’ influence of the concept of landscape in cultural by developing tactics that enable our survival geography. His analysis of feminist theories of and flourishing here and now. landscape (82–91) is particularly insightful in the context of critiques of representation and masculinity. Acknowledgements 4. Knopp did so in terms less obtusely essentializing than Castells (1983) in his early analysis of gay territorialization in San Francisco. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to 5. A call richly expressed by recent works in queer present an earlier version of this paper at the theory. See Mun˜oz’s (2009) work on concrete queer 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of utopias and Halberstam’s (2011)workonqueer American Geographers in New York City as failure. A queer urban ecology of New York City’s High Line 19

6. A term coined by Thrift (1999). devoted to something evil or immoral’. Even a non- 7. I am grateful to Jennifer Foster for insisting on the predicative use, which reflects the attribution of a role of urban animals in shaping the ecology of the quality of abandonment, takes this moral tone: High Line. Her work is an important foray into this ‘Chiefly attrib. (without to). Uninhibited, uncon- aspect of the more-than-human inhabitation of the strained; devoted to an influence, passion, etc., esp. abandoned High Line. Due to space and thematic one which is evil or immoral; profligate’ (Oxford limitations of this issue, I will not explore this English Dictionary Online 2012). relationship further here. 18. A possibility that was apparently never taken seriously enough to advocate for politically. 8. These figures are drawn from the websites and 19. Bien que le mot ‘allosexuel’ existe pour traduire en Federal Form 990 (non-profit) filings of the francais le sens politique du mot ‘queer’, je retiens respective organizations. ‘queer’ comme un mot plus courant. 9. In the preface to their High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky (2011), David and Hammond play into this mythology by describing themselves as ‘A pair of nobodies who undertook an References impossible mission’ (vii). 10. The list of supporters includes politicians Hillary Andersson, J. (2011) Heritage discourse and the desex- Clinton and Christine Quinn; celebrities Edward ualization of public space: the ‘historical restorations’ of Norton, Kevin Bacon, and Diane von Furstenburg; Bloomsbury’s Squares, Antipode 44(4): 1081–1098. and less well-known figures like John Alschuler, Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (2004) Authenticating queer space: Chairman of the consulting firm HR&A and current citizenship, urbanism and governance, Urban Studies president of the Board of Directors of FoHL, and Phil 41(9): 1807–1820. Aarons, founding partner of the Millennium Partners, Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds) (1995) Mapping Desire: a billion-dollar real estate development corporation. Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge. 11. As the West Village, Chelsea, and the Meatpacking Browne, K., Lim, J. and Brown, G. (2007) Geographies of District have gentrified, any reference to ‘community’ Sexualities. Aldershot: Ashgate. members must take account of the disproportionately Bunce, S. (2009) Developing sustainability: sustainability high incomes increasingly required to live in these policy and gentrification on Toronto’s waterfront, Local neighborhoods. Environment 14(7): 651–667. 12. For an extended version, see David and Hammond Calder, R. (2009) Sky ‘high’ costs: tax-seeking new park (2011); also Patrick (2011). already NY’s priciest [online], New York Post. http:// 13. The titillating and revealing poster for the event can be www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_jWqyNl68fwW viewed at http://www.gaycenter.org/node/7512 J3YVGVNlOhL (accessed 19 July 2013). 14. The profusion of acronyms listing identitarian Castells, M. (1983) The City and the Grassroots: A Cross- categories of sexuality is by no means uncontroversial. Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: Here, I have simply opted to use the descriptor University of California Press.

Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013 adopted by the organization itself. Cataldi, M., Kelley, D., Kuzmich, H., Maier-Rothe, J. and 15. For more on this, consult FIERCE!’s detailed archival Tang, J. (2012) Residues of a dream world: the High website (http://www.fiercenyc.org). See also the work of Line, 2011, Theory, Culture & Society 28(7–8): the Parallel Lines collective (http://parallellinesproject. 358–389. com), which has focused on the relationship between the Caulfield, J. (1989) ‘Gentrification’ and desire, Canadian Hudson River Park and the High Line development. Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 16. An exemplary popular critique can be found on 26(4): 617–632. Jeremiah Moss’ blog (http://vanishingnewyork.blogsp Chisholm, D. (2010) Biophilia, creative involution, and ot.com). His work stands out both for its tone and its the ecological future of queer desire, in Sandilands, C. exhaustive cataloging of the disappearing spaces of and Erickson, B. (eds) Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, ‘old’ New York. Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 17. The term ‘abandoned’ may also take a predicative pp. 359–381. form. To be abandoned to is to be ‘devoted or given Cloke, P. and Jones, O. (2002) Tree : The Place of up to an influence, passion, pursuit, etc.; (now esp.) Trees and Trees in their Place. Oxford: Berg Press. 20 Darren J. Patrick

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Abstract translations El asunto de desplazamiento: Una ecologı´a urbana La question du de´placement: Une e´cologie urbaine queer del ‘High Line’ de la Ciudad de Nueva York queer19 de la High Line de New York City Este articulo crı´ticamente se hace queer el aburgue- Cet article rend queer d’un œil critique l’embour- samiento a trave´sunana´lisis ´ gico del geoisement a` travers une analyse e´cologique de la reurbanizacio´ n del High Line de la Ciudad de re´novation de la High Line de New York City. Nueva York. Tomando el parque, abandonado y En conside´rant l’e´cologie queer abandonne´e trans- transformado de una ecologı´a queer a un espacio forme´e en parc homonormatif comme une forme homonormativo, como una forma innovadora de novatrice de l’embourgeoisement gay et vert, aburguesamiento homosexual y verde. Discuto que j’affirme que le ‘succe`s’ du projet doit eˆtre critique´ el e´xito del proyecto tiene que ser criticado en en termes e´cologiques relationnels. En intervenant te´rminos ecolo´ gicos relacionales. Interponiendo en dans la litte´rature sur l’embourgeoisement, je la literatura del aburguesamiento, empiezo explicar commence a` expliquer les aspects mate´riels los aspectos simbo´ licos del aburguesamiento ecolo´- et symboliques de l’embourgeoisement e´cologique gico con la ayuda de innovaciones de la geografı´ade a` l’aide des innovations dans la ge´ographie des plantas y ecologı´a queer. Para fundar mi ana´lisis, plantes et l’e´cologie queer. Mon analyse se base sur analizo el proceso de ‘sucesio´ n’, enfocando en uno le processus de la ‘succession’ s’axe sur une des de las plantas ma´s establecidas y exitosas creciendo plantes les plus e´tablies et abondantes, Ailanthus en el High Line abandonado, Ailianthus altissima o altissima dit ‘l’arbre du ciel’. En faisant usage des El A´ rbol del Cielo. Llevando de conocimientos apercus empiriques sur la strate´gie de re´novation, empı´ricos de la estrategia de reurbanizacio´ n, este cette explication interpre´tative de la High Line se cuento interpretativo de la reurbanizacio´ n del High penche a` la fois sur les queers et les plantes. En Line piensa en las plantas y los queers juntos. A passant par des couches de sexualite´,e´cologie, trave´s niveles de sexualidad, ecologı´a y geografı´a, el et ge´ographie, la question du de´placement saute au asunto de desplazamiento llega a ser ce´ntrico a una premier plan dans une conside´ration des possibilite´s consideracio´ n de posibilidades e´tico-polı´ticos para e´thico-politiques pour une critique e´cologique una crı´tica ecolo´ gica queer del espacio urbano. En queer de l’espace urbain. En conclusion, je resumen, discuto por un e´tico y polı´tico de recommande une e´thique et une politique de responsabilidad a y para espacios abandonados responsabilite´ a` et pour les espaces abandonne´s que nos requiere prestar ma´s atencio´ n al queer, al qui nous appelle a` eˆtre plus attentifs au queer, a` ecolo´ gico, y su implicacio´ n. l’e´cologique, et leur engagement continu. Palabras claves: aburguesamiento, ecologı´a urbana Mots-clefs: embourgeoisement, e´cologie urbaine queer, High Line, Ailanthus altissima, Ciudad de queer, High Line, Ailanthus altissima, New York Nueva York, estudios urbanos crı´ticos. City, e´tudes urbaines critiques. Downloaded by [Darren Patrick] at 08:10 13 November 2013