The Open Question of Marginal Nature -

The Discourse of Urban Nature and the Wasteland

In the United States, the foundational myths of Nature that we celebrate are the myths of wilderness and pastoral arcadia. They are the foundation of the discourse of American nature from which we assess the value of nature in America. However, we are now predominately a country of urbanites who have only occasional contact with wilderness or pastoral nature. To compensate for this urban depravation, we have incorporated green islands of nature into our cities to allow for contact with approximations of wild and rural landscapes. These deliberate systems of gardens, parks, and preserves are “green space” for formal, mediated encounter with officially managed “pedigreed” nature that incorporate elements of both wild and pastoral landscapes. Thus, our understanding of what constitutes “official” urban nature in cities is shaped by culturally dominant metaphors of Nature, which valorize urban nature that is either deliberately welcomed into the urban landscape – parks and gardens - or that redeem the built landscape through reminding us of native landscapes obliterated by the creation of the city – preserves, sanctuaries, and refuges.

Urban nature that falls outside of the categories of official planning is acknowledged positively when it can be discursively altered to fit within these narratives of wild or pastoral Nature. Thus, urban “wildlife” is another mediated, managed kind of urban nature found in the city. This urban fauna is judged as good when it in some way fulfills our expectations of wild or pastoral “urban” nature or condemned as pestilent when it fails to follow the narrative for “good” fauna in the city. This narrative of nature declares that everyday house sparrows, grackles, and pigeons are urban pests that further degrade the city, but nesting red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons are redemptive “wild” additions to the urban scene. However, this discursive categorization of good and bad urban wildlife illustrates the American expectation for urban nature to be decorative “natural” signifiers and to be managed as urban amenities like “green space” or “urban wildlife”. Moreover, it creates the odd circumstance that upon crossing the city limits a “rock dove” becomes a “winged rat”. The nature/society questions raised by urban fauna are numerous, and they have spawned a great deal of academic attention. What is marginalized in this new academic narrative of urban nature/urban fauna is another kind of urban nature which is the habitat for many of these “urban wild things.”

This other urban nature emerges in the wastelands and weedy margins of the urban landscape from the central business district to the suburban/rural fringe of a city. This other urban nature capitalizes on our neglect and flourishes through its own agency in urban wastelands like vacant lots, sewage ponds, unmaintained roadway and railway verges, derelict brownfields, and untended margins. Although we think of these places as idle and degraded land, nature is always busy "developing" these sites to its own standards of economy. Taking advantage of an opportunity, “weeds” – those plants out of place - colonize the bare earth, sprout from crumbling walls, or force their way through to make root-room in concrete and brick. A diverse community of urban fauna then claims this "fortuitous landscape" amidst the garbage and the flowers. This unplanned, unmanaged urban “open space” or “green space” is far more ubiquitous in the urban landscape than planned, managed, and officially sanctioned “open space” or “green space”. This rogue habitat emerges as the everyday backdrop to urban life, and, though hidden in the margins, it is close at hand for informal, unmediated encounter with “nature” – but what kind of nature is this ragged, prosaic habitat?

This assertive, resistive community is a hybrid type of nature both weedy and wild - the unintended product of human activity and nature's unflagging opportunism, which I call marginal nature. Marginal nature in the urban landscape is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather it is a kind of nature whose ecological and cultural meaning is an open question.

Sideoats Grama - the State Grass of Texas


This is the landscape that nobody wants. It’s my cup of rejection:
Driven to this unformed scraggly ignored backlot, this not-quite
Prairie, not-quite thicket, not even natural corner of
Texas, the hardscrabble left butt of a demoralized nation,
It is my choice and my pleasure to cherish this haphazard wilderness.
No, it’s not even “wild” – it’s a neglected product of artifice.
Come, let us walk by an improvised lakeshore, be given a vision:
Beaches of black dust, beautiful white ghosts, this drowned forest…
- Frederick Turner, Texas Eclogue, 1st stanza

Hadean Eclogues by Frederick Turner [ Story Line Press 1999]







…we [need to] abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial – completely fallen and unnatural – and the tree in the wilderness as natural – completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others.

William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.pp 88-89.

"A 'cesspool' under Montopolis bridge - access being ruined by trash, glass and pollution, some say"

This site in East Austin is one of the most used and abused marginal spaces in the city. I have monitored it for ten years and, in particular, I have followed the fortunes of this bald cypress tree growing from the concrete footer of Montopolis Bridge.

On some weekends you can find hundreds of people gathered to swim, fish, drink, bbq, and hang out. The Austin newspaper proclaimed this site a "cesspool" in an article yesterday [without saying if the pun was intended]. The article set off a racist/classist/enviro flame war in the comments after the article, revealing the social tensions over urban margins and cultural expectations/differences about how to engage nature. [and also how racism and environmentalism can be entwined]. Read for yourself http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/08/19/0819watch.html

No report about what the cypress tree thought...

The Paradox of Meddling 1

The paradox of meddling in the margins arises from human interaction with urban wastelands. Since the social appeal of these marginal spaces and wastelands is the absence of official sanction and control, we risk destroying the very characteristics which make these socially engaging spaces in the first place when we try to improve them through planning and management. For Kevin Lynch these spaces are “liberated zones” freed from social expectations of proper use of urban space,

“Shabby, ordinary places escape the weight of power, the intent to impress; they are liberated zones. They relieve us from the necessity of calculated communication and behavior. Not that they lack meaning – far from it – but they have the simplicity and ease of well-settled custom and familiar use. In many famous cities, the backsides are not only more revealing to the inquiring eye, but offer more enduring delights, once we are no longer tourists.”[1]

His perspective is decidedly a minority one within urban design and urban society as a whole. Whether it is urban planning, urban ecology, or urban nature appreciation, there is a compulsion to meddle with this waste space. The paradox of meddling is not just a problem for the social values of waste space, but it emerges as an unrecognized dilemma even for supporters of urban nature, such as urban landscape architects whose primary commitment is design with nature. However, as is the case with the new High Line landscape, urban nature enthusiasts purge the unwanted, weedy species which comprise marginal nature, and so, through this meddling “improvement” of the wastelands, we undo the cosmopolitan community which thrives there.

[1] Lynch, Kevin, Wasting Away
San Francisco : Sierra Club Books, 1990. p. 27

Urban Wastelands - Traditional Narratives and New Counter-narratives

Within the urban landscape, marginal nature seeks out neglected open spaces to establish itself. These can be “slivers” of leftover marginal land or whole large parcels of vacant land, but all of this urban space is “wasteland” from the perspective of the economic function of the city. Wasteland, vacant lot, derelict land, and brownfield are a few of names for the kinds of urban spaces in which marginal nature makes home. These are urban spaces defined by neglect and abandonment, where derelict structures decay and marginal nature is able to take hold. Urban wastelands and margins are literal “shreds and scraps” throughout the urban landscape, and so marginal nature can be found from the urban center to suburban fringe wherever leftover land is found.

These marginal spaces are assessed negatively by traditional narratives of good and bad urban space, for this is “wasteland” and “vacant/derelict land” which needs planning, management, and infill to be reclaimed by urban economic development and for proper social/environmental uses. The list of social, economic, and environmental problems associated with them is long. Sites like vacant lots and brownfields can harbor pollution, vermin, and disease from illegal dumping. They are also perceived as dangerous since they are used for illegal activity and since the homeless often utilize them for campsites, resulting in more trash and trouble. Thus, the dominant narrative of urban waste space is that wastelands are "problem" sites for the institutions charged with maintaining human and environmental health and safety. However, there are ecological and social counter-narratives about the positive values of these urban waste spaces.

In Kevin Lynch’s posthumously published book, Wasting Away, he celebrates “waste places” for their “ruinous attractions”,

"Many waste places have these ruinous attractions: release from control, free play for action and fantasy, rich and varied sensations. Thus children are attracted to vacant lots, scrub woods, back alleys, and unused hillsides…Adults, more inhibited by accepted ideas of beauty and value, will nevertheless also enjoy visiting a well-managed local dump or an established ruin…those screened, marginal, uncontrolled places where people can indulge in behavior that is proscribed and yet not harmful to others – are regularly threatened by clean-ups and yet are a necessity for supple society."[1]

Lynch’s libertarian argument turns the wastelands into sites of freedom from surveillance and control for humans. Thus, the wastelands become unique kinds of liberated spaces where social freedom and social marginality are seen as positive attributes of the urban landscape and “a necessity for supple society.” Though Lynch does not make the point, this issue of social marginality and wastelands is reinforced by the fact that wastelands are often literal human habitat, since they are a common location for homeless camps. This social counter-narrative, then, adds further complexity to the discursive dualities entangled with this kind of urban space, because it suggests a similar view of urban waste space as liberated spaces for nonhumans where they can be free of surveillance and control of humans. These urban waste spaces are perceptual ecotones where the boundaries of proper and improper nature and society meet and merge.

What emerges from the commingling of the proper and improper in these wastelands is a new narrative of urban waste space which casts them as a collaborative project between humans and nonhumans. This coproduction begins with the creation of this unique kind of opening in the urban landscape. Human agency creates the built landscape which ebbs and flows with development and dereliction and redevelopment. During ebb times, human neglect provides the temporal opening for the emergence of marginal nature, but these urban waste spaces are then shaped and filled through the agency of non-humans taking advantage of the opportunity and thriving. The nonequilibrium dynamic of periodic disturbance only adds to the diversity of the landscapes of urban waste spaces. This waste space is constantly changing with the process of urban development, a dynamic which favors a community adapted to disturbance – opportunists who make this wasteland home.

The creativity and novelty of marginal nature, its opportunistic, assertive, transgressive reclamation of urban wastelands and margins, reminds us that the built landscape is not just a homogeneous space of human action and domination but a heterogeneous nature/society hybrid. However, our perception of the built landscape as a nature/society coproduction is hampered by a discourse of urban space which delineates the value of urban space in reference to human society only. And so the reinterpreting of urban waste space from the perspective of marginal nature requires a rewriting of the narrative of the wastelands that includes nonhumans as collaborators in their creation. These nonhuman agents create spaces holding “ruinous attractions” which draw humans to them. A paradox arises from the uniqueness of this collaborative creation in urban waste spaces in which the meddling of well intend humans who seek to intervene in these spaces leads to the undoing of the qualities of these waste spaces that attract humans to them.

Future posts will explore this "Paradox of Meddling"

[1] Lynch, (1990) p. 26

The Marginal Nature of Walls

The best examples of the tenacity and opportunism of marginal nature are mosses, lichens, and plants that grow on walls. Some bird species like cliff swallows and barn swallows attach their mud nests to walls and bridges.

Urban ecologists study the wall ecology of older walls, and in Europe and Asia they have been studied as unique habitats - see Segar, Ecological Notes on Wall Vegetation (1969)

The case against the “imaginative greening” of the High Line

“The case for the imaginative greening of "brownfields"—derelict industrial sites, in planners' jargon—was tremendously advanced with the opening this June of the first segment of New York City's High Line, a linear park superimposed on the eponymous long- defunct cargo railroad trestle that wends through nearly a mile and a half of Manhattan's West Side from midtown to Greenwich Village.”

So begins Martin Filler’s piece in the New York Review of Books [Aug 13, 2009 Vol. 56 No. 13] about the High Line park in Manhattan http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22954 . Unfortunately, he unimaginatively accepts that “imaginative greening” is inherently good. His assumption, like that of the Friends of the High Line, is that we can “green” these places that nature has already greened and improve on nature’s agency. The “improvements” in the case of the High Line reveal little interest in preserving the actual plant community which inhabited the High Line. Rather, they developers of the new park destroyed that community shaped by the agency of nature and rebuilt a plant community to their liking and to the standards of human agency - of parkland and garden which creates the appearance of the actual marginal nature that formerly existed. Strange friends indeed.

Filler asserts, “The High Line marks a radical departure from the Classical model of the public park as rus in urbe —"country in city"—epitomized by London's Hyde Park and New York's Central Park, which allow one to imagine having been transported to an idyllic countryside. What makes walking the High Line such an intriguing experience is the way in which it celebrates rather than obviates the collision of natural and manmade environments.” However, although the setting – a rusting elevated railway – is a manmade environment, the new park is a facsimile of the former natural environment that inhabited the rusting railway. Filler points out that the new gardens are “meant to evoke the lush, self-sown greenery that thrived on the High Line during its three decades of desuetude” and the landscape design is an attempt, “to recapture some semblance of that volunteer vegetation.” That semblance excludes the unacceptable non-native species that transgress the code of native species championed by American conservationists, urban biologists, horticulturalists, and landscape architects. As Filler puts it, the High Line plantings are meant to look "messy," "unkempt," and "scruffy" and "less like a park and more like a scruffy wilderness," but the weeds have been banished. Thus, native sumac is used since it is “a shrub with compound leaves reminiscent of Ailanthus altissima, the weedlike "tree of heaven" apostrophized in Betty Smith's best-selling novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn of 1943 as an archetypal urban survivor accustomed to the toughest settings. (Conservationists now discourage use of that aggressively invasive species.)”

I find little to celebrate with the High Line since an occasion to learn from marginal nature and preserve the weedland on the High Line has been lost. The photographs on the Friends of the Highline website http://www.thehighline.org/ demonstrate how nonhuman agents assembled a cosmopolitan community that was aesthetically pleasing and inclusive of nonnatives which has been undone by the semblance of the former wildness imposed on the place by the human agents who think they know what is best for this kind of urban space. Where there was once freedom and unsanctioned creativity, there now is surveillance and only sanctioned nature is welcomed. Hence, no Tree of Heaven is allowed.

But give it a few years. Let the new park age a bit, and in the neglected margins a few weeds will return to remind us of what used to be.

What do shreds and scraps of the natural scene mean, after all, in the shadow of the citified whole? What can one patch of leftover land mean to one person’s life, or to the lives of all who dwell in the postindustrial wasteland? - Robert Michael Pyle, The Thunder Tree

This blog is a response to these questions from Robert Pyle’s book about a drainage ditch in the suburbs of Denver. These questions were not specifically addressed to geographers, but they are distinctly geographical questions about urban spaces that have been little studied by geographers – the shreds and scraps of nature that emerge in wastelands and margins in the urban landscape. His book is about a personal journey back to the origin of his life-long study of butterflies and of his foundational experience of affection for the natural scene. The irony for him is that it all began in a weedy drainage ditch, but he turns that irony back on himself and other American nature writers and environmentalists by insisting on the importance of “shreds and scraps” of urban space like vacant lots for an experience of nature in the shadow of the city. Interestingly, he uses a rhetorical sleight of hand to assist his argument - with the “ditch” becoming an “accidental urban wildland.” This rhetorical move is an attempt to fit these accidental habitats into the discourse of nature in America and, thereby, to use an accepted trope of the discourse of American nature - wildland - to signal that these overgrown urban margins are a part of nature and, therefore, worthy of our affection. But, if these leftover shreds and scraps of urban habitat are “nature,” what kind of nature is this accidental stuff?