Fringe Ecologies - a Case for New York Metropolitan Region, 1950-1980

Sevin Yildiz, university of illinois chicago

Urban planners had engaged with regional ecotones, transitional ecosystems, extractively from the 1930s metropolitan planning era through the urban decline of the early 1960s. During post-war urbanization, the traditional town-countryside divide evolved into a more complex pattern of land uses, as expanding suburbs and commercial centers layered new meaning and contestation onto the urban fringe. Around the same time, the emergence of entropy and non-linear science elevated ecotones in policy discussions, as the New York Metropolitan Region's estuarine planning had to contend with the proliferation of the urban fringe. By employing a 'fringe ecologies' lens, this paper examines the period between 1950 and 1980 in the New York Metropolitan Region to argue for the contemporaneous evolution of the urban fringe and estuarine planning.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 129. The City and Its Environments