New York’s High Line may be the best known conversion of industrial infrastructure to public park, and though it's been influential since it opened in 2009, it wasn’t the first.

Paris reimagined abandoned elevated rail tracks as a tree-lined promenade in 1993.

In Seattle landscape architect Richard Haag pushed for years to salvage decaying ruins, finally opening Gas Works Park in 1975.

Berlin’s Tempelhof airport became a refuge in 2010. An even more ambitious initiative had started three decades earlier, when Germany focused on rejuvenating its rust belt, in the Ruhr region, by preserving and celebrating that heritage with 50-mile-long Emscher Landscape Park. More than 100 projects are united in the park—factories and other sites have been reclaimed