I have just realised that I have been quietly picking up an old project----namely, Edgelands--whilst I have been haphazardly photographing for the Fleurieuscapes project. I hadn't realised that I had been making photographs of drosscapes, as I just did the photos in passing, and then forgot about them. They sat in the archives until I revisited the site on a recent poodlewalk. Then I remembered making the photos.
'Edgelands' refers to those non-descript spaces that lie between the urban and the rural. They are an ill-defined, constantly changing boundary that separates the city from the countryside. These transitional zones and disregarded spaces can be found anywhere that urban development meets open land.
The environmentalist Marion Shoard called these spaces “edgelands” and adding a description of these kind of spaces:
The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.
Shoard usefully defined these edgeland spaces as “the interfacial interzone between urban and rural”.