Fringe Ecologies of the New Jersey Meadowlands: Socio-Ecological Networks of Ecotones

Sevin Yildiz, university of illinois chicago

The urban fringe's character emerges through historical processes shaping its development. While urban scholars often portray the fringe as an unplanned residuum marked by random ecological features—mere byproducts of competing urban models—it reveals itself as a historico-geographical space challenging planning’s approach to systemic crises. The urban fringe defies planning through its resistance to boundaries, contributing to its inherent unplannability. This resistance to Cartesian logic creates new interpretive frameworks for analyzing its dynamics, marking these territories for inquiry precisely because their complexity transcends conventional regulatory frameworks. These spaces emerge as living laboratories, incubating alternative modes of conceptualizing relationships between planning and ecological processes. Ecotones, etymologically derived from the Greek conception of places where tension resides, constitute essential analytical frameworks in biogeography and ecological science, frequently characterized as "tension zones" or "zones of intermingling.” These boundary spaces function across spatial and temporal dimensions, revealing distinctive patterns in organismal, population, and community responses to environmental flux. Within these interstitial zones, ecological reproduction manifests through systemic exchanges, where biogeochemical engineering operates through intricate transfers between ecosystems. Energy and nutrient transference occur through tidal rhythms and the embodied agency of inhabitants—from rodents' geomorphological modifications to Spartina’s colonization of wetlands. This paper examines fringe ecologies through various networks, including muskrat dynamics, mosquito breeding grounds, and tidal datum contestations in the New Jersey Meadowlands circa 1850s. As reclamation interests initiated territorial interventions, resistance networks of non-anthropogenic agents complicated planning. Contemporaneously, the Public Trust Doctrine underwent juridical reinstatement to delineate tidal tracts and public rights. Along with urban plans, this study employs non-conventional historical documents marginalized in urban planning scholarship: botanical surveys, palynological samples, and tidal demarcations in cadastral surveys.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 47. Spaces of Marginalization