Robert Moses can confirm that elevated highways in urban areas act as a virtual DMZ, dividing sections of a city and creating strong boundaries between neighborhoods — often along socio-economic lines. In the middle of the 20th century, car-friendly cities were seen as futuristic, economically healthy cities, even if roads made them ugly, dirty, noisy, and generally harder to navigate. Even elevated train tracks cause these problems.
Image via Architect’s Newspaper/ Flickr user Melissa Venable
Miami’s elevated Metrorail is one such urban byway whose underbelly is a less-than-desirable place to be. But James Corner Field Operations has won a competition to design a 10-mile long stretch of land underneath the Metrorail into a park called the “Underline,” creating a restored natural habitat that can serve as a healthy getaway as well as a corridor for biking and walking. It reclaims the surface of an other-wise underused plot and and transforms it into park space, uniting two sides of the city.
Image via The Underline
Corner won the competition over some of the best landscape architects in the country, including dlandstudio, Balmori Associates, Perkins + Will, and Stoss. Of course, JCFO is the designer of New York’s High Line and they are well-suited for Miami’s clever take on it. University of Miami students originally envisioned the concept, and produced a series of renderings that show the potential of such a park.
A possible vision of the Underline by LandscapeDE. Image courtesy LandscapeDE.
This type of park is nothing new, of course, although the Underline will certain have its own character, taking the overpass parklet to an extreme. While the original model of the High Line was elevated train tracks, a host of new parks are cropping up that use the same urban infrastructure reclamation strategy of the High Line and others, but in new and unexpected places.
© Raad Studio
Low Line, New York.
New York’s Low Line would be the world’s first underground park, popping up in an abandoned section of trolley terminal on the Lower East Side. The project is made possible with technology that would bring light underground with a sophisticated series of mirrors. Of course, London recently announced plans to remake one of its subway lines into a bike commuter path.
London’s underground bike way. Image courtesy Gensler.
Helsinki took a downtown section of train tracks make it into the “Baana,” a bike path that weaves through the core of the city, a.k.a. a “bike superhighway.” Santiago plans to renovate a mile and a half of disused below-grade tracks, including a tunnel, to make a pedestrian-friendly path.
Helsiki’s Baana. Image via www.copenhagenize.com
Santiago’s Tunel de FFCC. Image via Plataforma Urbana
But perhaps the most similar example in recent memory is an initiative by Senator Renzo Piano’s G124 team, which piloted a renewal project called “Under the Viaduct” in northeast Rome last summer.