The High Line, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway in Manhattan, is one of the world’s most iconic new urban landmarks. Since the opening of its first section in 2009, this unique greenway has exceeded all expectations in terms of attracting visitors, investment, and property development to Manhattan’s West Side. Frequently celebrated as a monument to community-led activism, adaptive re-use of urban infrastructure, and innovative ecological design, the High Line is being used as a model for numerous urban redevelopment plans proliferating worldwide. Deconstructing the High Line is the first book to analyze the High Line from multiple perspectives, critically assessing its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts. Including several essays by planners and architects directly involved in the High Line’s design, this volume also brings together a diverse range of scholars from the fields of urban studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Together, they offer insights into the project’s remarkable success, while also giving serious consideration to the critical charge that the High Line is “Disney World on the Hudson,” a project that has merely greened, sanitized, and gentrified an urban neighborhood while displacing longstanding residents and businesses. Deconstructing the High Line is not just for New Yorkers, but for anyone interested in larger issues of public space, neoliberal redevelopment, creative design practice, and urban renewal.

**Winner, Phillip D. Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment** **A Planetizen Top Planning Book for 2017** After decades of sprawl, many American city and suburban residents struggle with issues related to traffic (and its accompanying challenges for our health and productivity), divided neighborhoods, and a non-walkable life. Urban designer Ryan Gravel makes a case for how we can change this. Cities have the capacity to create a healthier, more satisfying way of life by remodeling and augmenting their infrastructure in ways that connect neighborhoods and communities. Gravel came up with a way to do just that in his hometown with the Atlanta Beltline project. It connects 40 diverse Atlanta neighborhoods to city schools, shopping districts, and public parks, and has already seen a huge payoff in real estate development and local business revenue. Similar projects are in the works around the country, from the Los Angeles River Revitalization and the Buffalo Bayou in Houston to the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis and the Underline in Miami. In Where We Want to Live, Gravel presents an exciting blueprint for revitalizing cities to make them places where we truly want to live.

Widely noted for his role in the passage of the National Reclamation Act of 1902, Francis G. Newlands of Nevada was a champion of the growth of federal power in the modernization of America. One of the few liberal national Democrats at the beginning of the twentieth century, he is known as a key architect of the modern regulatory state. Newlands worked to irrigate the Nevada desert and other arid western states with nationally funded reclamation and dam-building projects. As a leading western Progressive, he supported national planning for the utilization of all the nation's water resources, the Progressive conservation cause espoused by Republican Theodore Roosevelt, and the supervision of private corporations by an enlarged and more powerful federal government. Yet he opposed Progressives on many issues, voicing suspicions about centralized banking, defending the right of private corporations to fair treatment by public regulatory agencies, even advocating the denial of suffrage to African Americans through the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. William Rowley's biography reveals a complicated and sophisticated man who successfully lived a dual political life under a cloud of personal and public scandal. It is a fascinating story of American politics in a time of immense national change.

In Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images, Edward Dimendberg offers the first comprehensive treatment of one of the most imaginative contemporary design studios. Since founding their practice in 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have integrated architecture, urban design, media art, and the performing arts in a dazzling array of projects, which include performances, art installations, and books, in addition to buildings and public spaces. At the center of this work is a fascination with vision and a commitment to questioning the certainty and security long associated with architecture. Dimendberg provides an extensive overview of these concerns and the history of the studio, revealing how principals Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro continue to expand the definition of architecture, question the nature of space and vision in contemporary culture, and produce work that is endlessly surprising and rewarding, from New York’s High Line to Blur, an artificial cloud, and Facsimile, a video screen that moves around a building facade. Dimendberg also explores the relation of work by DS+R to that by earlier modernists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Hejduk. He reveals how the fascination of the architects with evolving forms of media, technology, and building materials has produced works that unsettle distinctions among architecture and other media. Based on interviews with the architects, their clients, and collaborators as well as unprecedented access to unpublished documents, sketchbook entries, and archival records, Diller Scofidio + Renfro is the most thorough consideration of DS+R in any language. Illustrated with many previously unpublished renderings in addition to photos from significant contemporary photographers, this book is an essential study of one of the most significant and creative architecture and design studios working today.

Through an insightful look at projects from around the world and at the current design proposals for New York itself, the author paints a portrait of redevelopment that is both pragmatic and visionary, one that holds the promise of reconnecting New Yorkers to their waterfront as a vital place of work and of public life."--BOOK JACKET.

Fundraising and Strategic Planning: Innovative Approaches for Museums appraises strategies museums employ to raise funds including admission prices, membership categories, donor and affinity groups, and specialized event-driven efforts while examining new crowdfunding models such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Piggybackr. This book examines a range of ambitious undertakings and the means by which museums and cultural organizations achieve them. Each of the case studies in this volume focuses on the cornerstones to museum operations: strategic planning and fundraising. For example, Carl G. Hamm describes how Saint Louis Art Museum moved from a capital campaign into a sustainable stream of increased annual giving. Vicky U. Lee narrates the transformation of abandoned, elevated rail yards into an exciting, well-travelled (and highly-tagged and pinned) public amenity, the High Line. While not a museum per se, the High Line and its public art amenities offers much to the story of collecting institutions, as well as to the framework of the public-private partnership. The Innovative Approaches for Museums series offers case studies, written by scholars and practitioners from museums, galleries, and other institutions, that showcase the original, transformative, and sometimes wholly re-invented methods, techniques, systems, theories, and actions that demonstrate innovative work being done in the museum and cultural sector throughout the world. The authors come from a variety of institutions—in size, type, budget, audience, mission, and collection scope. Each volume offers ideas and support to those working in museums while serving as a resource and primer, as much as inspiration, for students and the museum staff and faculty training future professionals who will further develop future innovative approaches. Contributions by: Karen Coutts, Mike Deetsch, Nancy Enterline, Karen Gillenwater, Amy Gilman, Carl G. Hamm, Greg Hardison, Jill Hartz, Peter J. Kim, Vicky U. Lee, James G. Leventhal, Melissa A. Russo, and Irina Zeylikovich