Edge-lands-around-here

There is one place left that I would like to visit. Re-collecting myself, I move away from the riverbank of the Clyde and meander North West. There is a space near here that I spent time with during my own era. I think it was a car park that is now no longer in use, nestled between the Briggait and Saltmarket and about 5 minutes from my place of work in Trongate. During my lunch break, and if the weather was good, I would come to this site and eat. Whilst moving towards this site, I realise I have returned to my own time period of 2020.

During the summer, the space I am in erupts with Buddleja, or Butterfly Bush as it is colloquially called. Aglais Io, the peacock butterfly, can be seen fluttering around the purple flowered cones of the bush, along with red and white-tailed bumblebees, (Bombus Lapidarius and Bombus Locurum). Gently dusting themselves in swathes of sweet nectar, these insects frequent this unruly space. 

Buddleia’s British history sprouted in the Georgian era. Multiple species of plant were spilled across borders and were reaching countries with lands that were un-kin to their usual context of existence. Imperial and colonial endeavour enabled plant species from far away lands to be introduced into the UK through the activity of botany. Unbeknown to Buddleja’s namesake, Reverend Adam Budde, this bush would root itself into common British scenery. It grows wildly in abandoned spaces, popping up amongst the dilapidated brickwork of forgotten buildings.

Google Street View of abandoned car park/edge-land near Saltmarket

Lying down, I ease my newly fragmented body onto a small patch of wild grass in the middle of the car park. The site is a host to multispecies encounters, however it is an encounter in itself, a space where city planning meets the unruly edges of that city. Borrowed from Anna Tsing, unruly edges is a grouping of words Tsing employs to denote/defend/determine those gaps, inbetweens, and liminal sites that seem to slip off the surfaces of maps. These sites are 21st century terra incognita. 

Tsing speaks of the radical act of noticing marginal spaces. To pay attention to the unruly edges is to ‘refuse the boundaries that cordon nature from culture’. These margins and thresholds are mostly deemed as wasteland by city planners, council officials and people living near them. A fly-tippers' dream, these often overgrown sites are imbued with unplanned flourishing. Thinking of a way in which I could highlight these sites to myself, I began to think of them as edge-lands. Edge-lands are inherent in city planning; it seems that however much planning and mapping humans carry out, there will always be fissures, arising in the gaps between tower blocks. Fissures, margins, liminals, thresholds: all of these words evoke negativity within the rhetoric of progress within the anthropocene. To suggest fallibility within a system, or construct, which plans for all eventualities, is to question the ways in which urban areas are arranged, and for whom. To be fallible is to be vulnerable, and edge-lands tease out vulnerability within the planned city, curtailing notions of property and ownership by existing despite their undesirability.

Within her article, Tsing speaks of fungi as a critical and imperative species that can teach humans about being vulnerable. To be vulnerable to the lives of more-than-human-others, and to notice the way in which the human species intersects with many other non-human counterparts, could be a radical means to de-centralise human endeavour and shutter anthropo-mastery after a long reign. Fungi and lichen use symbiotic processes in order to live and in doing so are actively vulnerable in order to invite encounters. They thrive on the mulch of dead trees and forgotten plants, which edge-lands are often brimming with. Plant and animal life is composted with human life within the realm of the edge-land. This realm is a palimpsest, containing speech, laughter, conversation, debate, suffering, turmoil, trauma, and the communal identities of thousands of people. It also contains all the necessary aggregates and substrates needed to build and re-build a city. 

Edge-lands are ignored archives containing a wealth immeasurable by our current neo-Liberal rhetoric. 

Edge-lands display vulnerability, powerlessness and insufficiency when they are viewed through the lens of Capitalist and frontier-conquering endeavour.

Edge-lands are not sites of overgrown chaos -  they should be respected as a vital aspect of urbanised life. 

I know a lot of edge-lands, which if you recall inspired this undertaking of time-travel in the first place. Due to multiple upheavals of both the fabric of land and society, the East End is home to edge-lands, fissures and unruly seams. Resting amongst the Buddleja in an abandoned car park near Saltmarket seems to be an adequate way to end my time-travel. Perhaps in 500 more years, this edge-land, nestled in one of the most active sites in historical and contemporary Glasgow City, will be removed as spoil and built upon. 

Edge-lands are ignored archives. The ignored archive is possibly the most fertile. 

Buddleja drawing, fineliner on paper, 2020

In order to continue my ongoing creative research into edge-lands, I have made a short survey - you can find it here 
Thank you