Writing the margins
Having ruled out the use of the landscape as part of any larger critique, the authors occasionally gesture towards the bewildering effects of capitalism, but, hands tied by their stated desire to present a largely positive view of the urban fringes, they shy away from examining the wider implications of these often troubling places. Baldly put, the edgelands are fucking awful, by and large. Yet in these landscapes, the untidy, the inaccessible and the heterogenous can tell us something about the economics and politics of urban space: what the city chooses to let in, and what it keeps at the periphery either through physical or economic compulsion.
Karl Whitney on Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts‘s Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness.