I.
Intersections between the natural world and the built environment have always fascinated me. Whether it’s lush grasslands flourishing beneath highway overpasses and vacant buildings reclaimed by knotweed or crumbling roads cordoned off from public use and transmission towers with dirt-bike trails threaded below, there is an allure to these spaces that, for years, I was unable to articulate. They are wild in man’s absence, yet the human imprint is still visible: graffiti, empty liquor bottles, broken furniture, footpaths worn in tall grass. Evidence of life—human, animal, insect, plant—is everywhere. But it is also a type of oblivion—a place between places. The existence of these in-between worlds, and understanding their origins, is what first piqued my interest.
In August of 2023, several years after Shopping Mall had been published and I was gathering material for another potential book, I started a notebook to collect ideas and research related to the intersectional spaces between humans and nature. I wrote down terms like Anthropocene, defined as “an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” I made a reading list that included a seemingly odd assortment of books—from God’s Own Junkyard by Peter Blake to Underland by Robert MacFarlane. And I began collecting photographs that visually represented this concept, including Edward Burtynsky’s massive photography of scale and human impact, and Tag Christof’s haunting but beautiful pictures of the American landscape and its faded monuments to capitalism. The book would look at these spaces where the built environment bleeds into the natural world, and vice versa. Essentially, where humans and nature meet, alter, improve, degrade, or disrupt one another.
As a young kid, I saw these spaces from behind the passenger-side window of my dad’s Plymouth Duster on our way to school or the grocery store or my grandmother’s house near the Norfolk-Southern railroad tracks that carried trains eastward to Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Growing up in the postindustrial expanse of Pittsburgh in the eighties and nineties, decay was omnipresent. But so too was a weird sense of wonder. Railroad tracks were like old footpaths and abandoned buildings were inner worlds to investigate. Highway overpasses offered invigorating near-death experiences while slag heaps dotted with construction debris inspired crude adolescent weapon-building and object destruction.
In the realm of postwar and contemporary art, this type of interzone is what curators and artists often refer to as “liminal space,” an inflection point between the present and the future, or a physical or metaphorical limbo that evokes feelings of ambiguity or unease. Liminal space, as a concept, evokes a certain sense of dread. Think abandoned shopping malls or shuttered theme parks or empty hotels. These spaces also exist in video games and are fodder for hundreds of YouTube videos.
II.
As I began to sketch out what this book could be, I also looked to John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World as a place to start or at least draw inspiration. Comprised of five books—Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), Assembling California (1993), and Crossing the Craton (2002)—McPhee’s Annals is career-spanning work. On the surface, it’s a book about geology. But as you travel with McPhee throughout North America, you learn it is a book very much about time, wonder, and what it means to be human:
If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.
McPhee is smart and incisive and analytical, and his writing is based in facts either discoverable in nature or proven out through science. My writing, on the other hand, traffics in memory and research filtered through lyrical memoir-based narratives. It lacks the rigor required for such serious work, I told myself. But then again, why would writing about these liminal spaces between neighborhoods or towns or city blocks or suburban developments or forests or highways need to be so serious? If anything, a certain level of absurdity abounds. Thinking more about the joy and wonder found in these unlikely spaces, I was reminded of a perfect example.
III.
In 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks, photographer Joel Sternfeld approached publisher Gerhard Steidl with a book proposal. For two years before the attacks, Sternfeld had been photographing a stretch of abandoned railroad tracks on Manhattan’s West Side. He was working with a preservation group called Friends of the High Line that wanted to transform the nearly two miles of track into a park. And they wanted to do so before corporate and political interests could rush forward commercial development plans. The resulting book, Walking the High Line, is an otherworldly collection of photographs that perfectly illustrate the delicate line between the built environment and the natural world. In part, Sternfeld’s images reveal how a re-wilded New York might look. However bittersweet, they also offer a final glimpse of the city in its pre-gentrification era. Looking at them for the first time in years, I was struck by how well Sternfeld’s photographs telegraph the beauty and awe of untamed nature while foreshadowing the dystopian landscapes that, to this day, still dominate American films, television, video games, and books. Twenty-five years after the images were first made, they remain relevant but unsettling.
IV.
Still, is it possible these spaces between have remained unnamed and maybe even unrecognized by writers, researchers, or scholars. Surely not. That’s when I discovered Marion Shoard, a British writer and environmentalist known for her work concerning access to the countryside and land-use conflicts. In 2002, she coined the term “edgelands,” which explicitly refers to the spaces between town and country:
Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different from either. Often vast in area, though hardly noticed, it is characterised by rubbish tips and warehouses, superstores and derelict industrial plant, office parks and gypsy encampments, golf courses, allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy, farmland.
In her essay, Shoard continues to refine her definition:
All these heterogenous elements are arranged in an unruly and often apparently chaotic fashion against a background of unkempt wasteland frequently swathed in riotous growths of colourful plants, both native and exotic. This peculiar landscape is only the latest version of an interfacial rim that has always separated settlements from the countryside. In our own age, however, this zone has expanded vastly in area, complexity and singularity. Huge numbers of people now spend much of their time living, working or moving within or through it. Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man's land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.
What Shoard articulates in that last sentence really stuck with me: “this mysterious no man's land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.” It sticks with me because in Pittsburgh, where I live, ongoing disputes between city government and those experiencing homelessness have spotlighted these spaces in ways I wasn’t expecting—or at least wasn’t expecting would inform my thinking. Often the disputes arise over the encampments that pop up in edgelands all around the city: beneath highway overpasses, up against railroad property, or along hard-to-access riverfront space. If the edgelands themselves go unnoticed—and more pointedly, unused—why does the city value them more when empty than when serving to shelter those in need?
The commonality among these wide-ranging, seemingly disparate examples, of course, is human behavior. How the choices of a few shape our living conditions and alter our futures. How those in positions of power prioritize profit over the welfare of people. How moneyed interests forever strive to own and control more. How history infinitely repeats itself. It begs the question: What does a place say about its people?
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