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.

"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...

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