Moss valley – collaboration on and in the edgeland

Edgelands are those spaces that are neither urban nor rural, that seem to be unplanned or unmanaged, and that exist in a patchy between. This article argues that collaborative artistic responses to these spaces are particularly appropriate using a collaboration between the author and visual artist Abi Goodman as an example. This collaboration aims to respond to the tensions that the term edgeland sometimes allows writers to ignore by exploring the term’s history as it morphs from rurban fringe, to rural, urban interface, to postindustrial land, to unmanaged space. It aims to allow the recognition of edgeland as a paradoxical space based upon the writer’s experience in one place, Moss Valley.