Linear ruptures: two faces of the High Line (New York) and the urban void of the Line (Saudi Arabia)

Focusing on the two linear developments at the forefront of 21st-century urbanism, the High Line in New York City and the Line in Saudi Arabia, the article argues that both create ruptures, albeit very differently: in the first case in the urban fabric and in the second case in the landscape – the first reuses and retains existing urban infrastructure while the second ruptures the desert environment with a massive investment in infrastructure with purportedly sustainable tools. The High Line and the Line embody the kind of rupture in which seemingly sustainable efforts reorder and re-ruin spaces to make them either actively exclusionary in the case of the Line, or to struggle, and at times achieve, bridges for social connectedness, as is happening with the High Line. The “second face‘ of the High Line is suggestive of the potential to mend the ruptures and reshape social practices in its public space through inventive design interventions. The article draws on Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen, and Susan Fainstein to consider these developments through conceptualizations of urban disorder, the theoretical lenses of global urbanism and the ’just city,” and offers insight into the limitations and possibilities for resistance in contemporary planetary urbanism.