Rowan Moore, of The Guardian, highlights in his compilation of the world’s best urban green areas, the transformation of High Line Park from an abandoned railway into an elevated urban park in 2009. Its appeal arises from blending its industrial heritage with vibrant gardens, art installations, and breathtaking skyline vistas. Additionally, these urban green spaces play a role as communal meeting points, fostering social unity and strengthening community ties in megacities like New York.

Impossible to omit, although its popularity means that it is often now not a park so much as a slow shuffling queue of visitors, who might get some glimpse of Piet Oudolf’s planting, which beautifully developed the self-seeded wilderness that grew on the abandoned railway viaduct on which the High Line is made. The genius of the place is, more generally, its creative enhancement of the accidents of time and place that led to a park in the air. It is now spawning purported “high lines” all over the world. All miss the point, which is that it is unrepeatable.