Frankenstein Urbanism: Eco, Smart and Autonomous Cities, Artificial Intelligence and the End of the City

engagement activities in such projects are simply tokenism. Yet in the last few years, projects like the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington (DC) and the India Basin Shoreline Park in San Francisco (CA) have focused on helping long-time residents remain in place. Further, the Friends of the High Line created the High Line Network, a national partnership among adaptive reuse projects that recently developed the Community First Toolkit to help park builders center equity. Thus, progress in this area is happening, even though the book’s criticism of privately led postindustrial parks is well justified. The book concludes with perhaps some of its less developed ideas, describing strategies to advance equity in adaptive reuse park projects. Specifically, Loughran suggests that cities should “abolish private park corporations” (p. 179), “decolonize the links among race, capital, and the aesthetics of nature” (p. 181), and “let the rails rot” (p. 182). Some of these suggestions, such as cutting ties with park conservancies, might be unfeasible in today’s political and financial environments. Further, the author could have described strategies to avoid the displacement of low-income renters when such large park projects are built. Despite the limitations of these policy recommendations, I found the book presents some new important insights and is elegantly written.