IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Cities have always included – among their planned and officially inhabited spaces – “vacant” spaces, “interstices” or even wastelands. These different statuses or definitions can be attributed to different types of places in the city and have been at the heart of many studies and researches of different disciplines of urbanism, geography, planning etc. They appear to be new reservoirs for urban redevelopment and for the expression of new urban practices in the city. This can be observed in the case of abandoned railroad lines in Beirut, Paris and New York, where their reclamation reaffirms their social, urban and ecological potential. These abandoned rail infrastructures both connect and transect diverse communities and neighborhoods. As transport needs evolve and rail infrastructure falls into disrepair and ruin, each city uniquely reclaims the structures and spaces in an unofficial process of re-integration that precedes and at times presages more official efforts to reclaim them as greenways, bike paths, and parks. .These spaces and structures form the basis of complex actor-networks that vie to re-define and recharacterize the spaces according to their use – as bio corridors of green overgrowth, illicit hangouts, art venues, porous shortcuts, or backyard extensions. This paper maps the three actor-networks that have built up around the ruins of Paris’s Petite Ceinture, Lebanon’s Beirut-Bekaa line, and New York’s Rockaway Beach Branch Line of the Long Island Rail Road. In each case the unique tensions among uses and actors have allowed the actor-network to remain in flux, and to allow these spaces to remain spaces of undefined potential that nevertheless profoundly affect their surrounding neighborhoods and communities.