Neither Land nor Water : Planning Through Fringe Ecologies in the Meadowlands (1896–2020)

An urban and environmental history of the New Jersey Meadowlands, where marsh meets megamall. The New Jersey Meadowlands, the vast marshes across the Hudson River from New York City, are a mysterious and complex wetland. Both strange and well-known to the millions of people who traverse the northeast corridor every year, this landscape is not well understood despite its familiarity. Seemingly natural and unnatural, human and nonhuman, the Meadowlands has long been shaped by urban development, industry, infrastructure, and countless dreams. In Neither Land nor Water, Sevin Yildiz offers a close look at the planners, scientists, developers, politicians, industrialists, and others who have engaged with, dreamed about, or damaged this transitional ecology in different ways over the decades. She traces key periods in the area’s rich histories of urban planning and ecological thought, from the dispossession of the Lenape natives, through the dawn of ecological science, and onto both intensive industrial developments and environmental resistance to them. She examines as well how the Meadowlands exposes the inadequacies of today’s approaches to planning in the face of climate change and how they perhaps offer clues to a better future.