ABSTRACT
The last chapter of the book interrogates celebrated spatial initiatives during the first decade of the millennium, such as the reconfiguration of the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts in Lincoln Square and the transformation of the High Line into an elevated park in Chelsea. These projects closed a decade of dramatic economic and emotional shock after an unimaginable terrorist attack, which led the city into a questionable era of very profitable solutions for the revitalization of former industrial and neglected areas through an accelerated process of urban renewal and infrastructural revitalization. An urgent plan to economically revive New York City as a greener, more accessible, more open city that casted waterfront development as a moral imperative but raises many questions regarding the city's crisis of identity. An imperative, which overlooks the most decisive factors in the city's downturn: the unstoppable increase of land value by replacing low-rent workers and factories with manicured waterfront parks, high-rent professionals, and office buildings.
