Alexander Arroyo, Michael Luegering
The megalopolis generates, appropriates, and maintains multiple scales of fringe—a condition of thickened threshold, relative periphery, and inclusive exteriority. This fringe may be understood less as a particular geographic condition, and more as a hybrid spatial and temporal condition engendered by processes of decentralization and shifting agglomerations, a kind of phase space of urbanization. As a generalized condition, the fringe condition is one of disproportionate productivity in relation to the geographic extents, infrastructural connectivity, and population density of its constitutive territory. This productivity inheres in the abundance of endemic resources; the fragile integrity of these systems is in turn threatened by the spatial effects of cycles of capital accumulation (through resource dispossession and degradation) by which the fringe is valorized in the first place. The fringe, therefore, is a metabolic condition of fragility and transformation, and to engage it as such demands a distributed, adaptive, and systematic design methodology that may operate on these terms. The complex metabolic matrices of wetland, cranberry bogs, aquacultural habitat, sand and gravel extraction, “lifestyle” residential development, and decentralized hydrologic infrastructure that characterize the Buzzards Bay watershed region of southeastern Massachusetts provide a contextually unique yet operationally paradigmatic case of the fringe condition. A close study of the metrics of this metabolic matrix refigures how we may respond to pressures of transformation—a rising saline gradient, nitrification, changing cycles of seasonal labor, and inhabitation, among others—through contextually responsive, functionally agile, and technically replicable design tactics. Furthermore, through this analytic, those heterogeneous populations that inhabit the fringe emerge as territorial agents, for whom new cooperatives may be envisioned, designed, and deployed through the landscape. To design as such reconsiders the fringe beyond the disciplinary infrastructures of central-
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Vulnerable Endemism