Edgeland  is a way of exploring  how place, landscape, space are represented in visual form and how different places invite different ways of seeing in our visual culture.    It is characterised by rubbish tips and warehouses, derelict industrial plant, dying settlements,  allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy, farmland. It is an interfacial rim that has always separated settlements from the countryside to a greater or lesser extent. It is the territory where town and country meet and are usually seen as blots on the landscape. 

  

Place is bounded and specific to a location, and is a materialization of social forms and practices as well as affective experience. Space tends to be understood as abstract, unlimited, universalizing, and continuous. Places are often more grounded, serve as reference points in our lives, and have distinct qualities that give people a sense of belonging. In this context landscape refers to  an environment that has been modified, enhanced, or exploited through human activity, and begin to question how we experience and cultivate our relation to the environment. 

For most, the non-human environment is the “natural” world, and “nature” is largely imagined as something prior to and separate from human activity. Yet there really is no natural environment in the sense of being untouched, and we are increasingly recognizing the impact people have upon the earth and well beyond. In Australia this conception of nature is termed wilderness.

Edgelands  that people experience have, to some degree, been shaped by human activity. They have  an ecological dimension and a form of  nature  that is produced. This way of thinking about how the environment has been shaped by human activity  suggests that edge lands are  produced through the ongoing interaction of nature, culture and human activity.