Chapter 1 On the Edge The edge. The fringe. The urban-wilderness interface. Desakota. Twilight zone. Interzone. Rurban. Peri-urban.
Suburbia. Exurbia. Terrain vague. The hinterland. There are many words for the eerie edgelands of the metropolis, the place where city crashes into nature. Victor Hugo called it ''bastard countryside'': ''To observe the city edge is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed field, beginning of shops .'' If only it could be so clear cut.
Often, the urban edge is a transi- tion zone. The term ''desakota'' is made up from the Indonesian words desa (''village'') and kota (''town''). It describes a liminal area where intensive agriculture and village life are jumbled up with industry, suburbs, squatter villages and spiralling road systems. Applied to endless sprawl in the rural-urban regions of developing countries in south-east Asia, the subcontinent and Africa, ''desakota'' is expressive of the strange, blurred hybridity of modern urban edge- lands the world over, with their uneasy mix of uses - farms and shopping malls, office parks and patches of ancient woodland, golf courses and trailer parks, reservoirs and rubbish dumps, out-of-town offices and derelict wastelands. We all know these edgelands. This eerie never-zone was the inspiration for Ernest Lawson in New York at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his paintings of the margins of the metropolis, we can see the sorry state of Manhattan''s countryside as apartment blocks encroach like a besieging army. All that is rural and wild will become a level grid of streets once the rock has been dynamited, the land flattened and the trees cut down.
In the meantime, this is a place of abandoned fields taken over by weeds. ''Who but Lawson can bring beauty out of a region infested with squalid cabins, desolate trees, dumping grounds, and all the other impossible familiarities of any suburban wilderness?'' asked one of his patrons. Lawson captured the moment just before nature is converted into concrete. The frontline never stays still for long. Writing at about the same time, the naturalist James Reuel Smith said that the terrain beyond New York''s 72nd Street had been ''a forest in a primi- tive state'' as recently as the 1880s. All that had gone within two decades, replaced by ''asphalt walks and close-cropped lawns''. You had to venture to Washington Heights, close to what would become 171st Street, to witness the ''almost unbroken woods, up hill and down dale, interspersed with deep ravines, with numerous noisy brooks, rocks, a fallen tree, and all the wilderness of a place far out in the country'' by the 1900s. But not for long: all this was daily ''dis- appearing from sight with such celerity that it is merely a matter of months when there will be none whatever left in view upon Man- hattan Island''.
The total reordering of the landscape had begun with European settlement and accelerated in the nineteenth century as New York''s population grew from 33,000 in 1790 to 515,000 by 1850 and 3.48 million by 1900. As the population grew, the city expanded into the wetlands and meadows that made the Hudson Bay estuary one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet. As detailed in Ted Steinberg''s chilling, magnificent book, Gotham Unbound: the ecological history of Greater New York , hills were flattened, and bogs were filled with the debris and heaps of garbage. Draining, filling and urbanising ''unsightly'', ''worthless'' wetlands was hailed as a ''public improvement'' by press, politicians, planners and real estate dealers as a way of converting unproductive emptiness into dollars. In the 1930s and 40s, areas of wetland collectively equal to the size of Manhattan disappeared in a fury of development. And that was just the curtain raiser to a more sustained onslaught in the decades that followed. LaGuardia, JFK and Newark international airports were built upon filled wetlands, as were major shipping terminals.
The 32,000 acres of white cedar swamp at the Hackensack Meadows in New Jersey - a wilderness just five miles from the Empire State Building - were greedily eyed up as ''potentially the most valuable unbuilt area of its kind in the whole world''. Rubble from the London Blitz - brought as ballast on returning ships - was tossed into the marshes, along with garbage and chemical waste. By 1976 it had been pared down to 6,600 acres. New York''s master planner Robert Moses looked at one of the metropolis''s last major intact marshlands in the 1940s - 2,600 acres of wetland at Fresh Kills on Staten Island - and licked his lips at an ''immense acreage of meadow land . which is presently valueless''. The first step in its conversion from ecological treasure house to valuable real estate was - as ever - to fill it up with trash. Fresh Kills became the largest garbage dump in the world by 1955. For years on end, it received 29,000 tons of waste generated by the city every day.
The flat salt marshes had been transformed, within a few years, into a mountain range of human waste, the peaks of which reached 225 feet. Within sight of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Fresh Kills became a nightmarish monument to what cities do to the ecosystem. They consume the natural world with a ferocious appetite, and their outputs are pollution and waste, poi- soning rivers and wetlands, converting natural habitats into toxic landfill. Amid this orgy of destruction at Fresh Kills, in 1970, former New York Sanitation Commissioner Samuel J. Kearing looked at the rap- idly accelerating destruction of the wetland wilderness and asked which was more important, unthinking urban development ''or the preservation of wild birds and the biological community of which they -- and we -- are a part''. ''I''d vote in favour of the birds,'' he declared. ''I think many more would vote that way, too, if they had been with me when I made my first inspection of the Sanitation Department''s landfill at Fresh Kills. It had a certain nightmare qual- ity.
I can still recall looking down on the operation from a control tower and thinking that Fresh Kills . had for thousands of years been a magnificent, teeming, literally life-enhancing tidal marsh. And in just 25 years it was gone, buried under millions of tons of New York City''s refuse.'' His was a lonely voice. ''We have pushed back the sea and filled in the swamp for parks and airports,'' the New York Times exalted in 1946, celebrating the victory of the metropolis over the constraints imposed on it by nature. The ''path to progress'', it said, was the result of the ''wise use of the garbage pail and other refuse'' in creat- ing dry land out of bog. Natural limits to growth had been obliterated. The ecology and landscape of the edgelands was a resource to be consumed, transformed and entirely remade, and there was little compromise; by the end of the twentieth century, 90 per cent of the tidal and freshwater wetlands were gone for ever.
The conversion of nature into city, the reclamation of the apparently useless into something profitable and the near-total transformation of the landscape in the greater New York region, was a forerunner for developments across the world in the later twentieth century. Take Singapore, where, as in New York, an unpromising location was re-engineered to exploit its geographical advantages as a trading hub. During its colonial period, Singapore added 740 acres to its landmass by filling mangrove swamps, drain- ing marshes and expanding the shoreline. In the three decades that followed full independence in 1965, the city state reclaimed an add- itional 34,100 acres from the sea, massively expanding its size in the process and (literally) setting the stage for its economic ascendancy. As a result, more or less the entire coastline of Singapore is artificial, with devastating consequences for the area''s profuse biodiversity. A mere 5 per cent of the thirty square miles of mangrove forests that existed in 1819 survive today. Most of the sandy beaches are gone, while 60 per cent of the forty square miles of coral reefs were obliterated. So it goes with city after city across the world: entire ecosystems are remade to pave the way for economic take-off.
The destroyed aquatic edgelands of cities - the unlovely marshes, the thick man- grove forests and unseen coral reefs - represent the confrontation between city and nature and, more importantly, the Anthropocene. The rapid loss of Lawson''s gritty New York edgelands became a feature of cities all over the planet in the later twentieth century and beyond as the rest of the world emulated America''s turbo-charged urbanisation. An observer of the modern Bangladeshi ''bastard countryside'' wrote, ''There are few horizons which are devoid of settlement, but where they begin and end is often impossible to judge.'' Between 1982 and 2012, 43 million acres of farmland, forest and wilderness were suburbanised in the United States, an area the size of Washington State. That''s two acres of open land claimed by the suburbs every minute. Urban edges and dull suburbs are hardly the thing of romance; we hurry past them. But we need to pay attention to this easily avoided, unloved interzone. Edgelands represent the fastest-changing habitat on the planet.
They are the site of eco-apocalypse, the graveyard of endangered flora and fauna. The urban-rural fringe is also becoming the predominant habitat of the species Homo sapiens . Every day, an area of land the size of Manhattan Island is urban- ised. This is city as mass extinction event. In 2010, 50 per cent of humans were living in cities; by the middle of the century, the figure will be 75 per cent. And we are spreading ourselves out: the propor- tion of land covered by concre.