Through the lack of context and their subversive edgy characteristics, edgeland sites can harbour suspicion. These are out of town areas where the socially marginal meet for questionable or immoral activities. These dystopias are enforced and exploited through film and tv. Throughout the 1990's the backdrop of the indie crime movie was an edgeland site. The place where money is exchanged, money is stolen, and the criminal-protagonist cover is walking the dog. Of course, the edginess is hyperbole, visually enhanced with banal industrial architecture, debris and monotonous colour balances. Film portrays them as landscapes where concluding conflict is played out. In reality, these areas, besides the occasional glimpses of marginal society (the attempted dog theft) spurring suspicion, are not straightforward dystopias but banal urban peripheries with complex social processes.
Author of the term:
The aura of excitement which goes with the apparent lawlessness of the edgelands has been exploited in such films of the 1990s as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Seven, Things to Do in Denver When you’re Dead, Fargo and The Straight Story. (Shoard, 2000, p. 130)
[[Roberts, M. S.]] co-author of edgelands Journeys Into England's True Wilderness (2011):
Marion Shoard’s coining of ‘edgelands’ seemed to conjure exactly our experience of these places. They were, and are, edgy. In British tv drama and low budget films, the edgelands are always the place of the dénouement, the place where the drug gang is busted, the car chase ends, or the kidnap victim is rescued. These are places where anything could happen. And when it did, it was usually illegal or contravened every rule of health and safety. This sense of the edgelands as a dystopian landscape is a familiar trope of British popular culture in particular. (Roberts, 2016, pp. 19–20)
Roberts, M. S. (2016) ‘The Making of Edgelands’, English Topographies in Literature and Culture, pp. 17–24.
Shoard, M. (2000) ‘Edgelands of Promise’, Landscapes, pp. 117–146.