A Canadian-based reflection on Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots

There was one empty lot on the street I grew up on, in a small northern Canadian town. The unmowed grass grew tall and it was thick with dandelions. The lot never seemed empty, it became a throughway, a pathway, a secret hiding place for kids alone. Now like most Canadians I live in a city, and when lots are empty, I am curious why? What dark history keeps them from a needed in-fill in this time of precarious rentals and high housing demands? Saskatoon has an estimated 257 single-lots that remain empty, and an unknown number of brownfield sites, small constellations of urban malaise or ecological resilience depending on your perspective, all of which is surrounded by the porous edge of a city sprawling onto prairie.

Most nature writing focuses on the pristine, untouched natural world that draws a writer in closer to study the minutiae or draws your gaze wider to notice unseen connections. Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots skillfully does the opposite, inviting his reader to join him in exploring urban edgelands and back alleys. Brown’s focus is Austin, Texas, but his stories resonate here on the Canadian prairies as my city grapples with cycles of economic growth and malaise: resource exploitation and the inevitable environmental impacts, people pushed into the unclaimed spaces of the city—safe as long as they remain hidden—and the flourishing resurgence of plants and animals along urban edges.

Brown is an expert in these wild urban spaces. He purchased an empty lot in the industrial section of Austin, Texas and slowly reclaimed a vacant site, a process that included getting a petroleum pipe removed. He demonstrated that the land was not contaminated, by not only building a house on the lot, but also by raising a family on land most would avoid. While few parents are drawn to such an endeavour, Brown also chronicles his urban exploration with his eldest child, taking his reader through sometimes bizarre encounters, like spotting a coywolf (coyote-wolf hybrid) that challenges taxonomic classification. Other stories are endearing, for instance, Brown convinces a car salesman trained as an urban wildlife tracker to teach his son’s third grade Cub Scout den how to read the signs of animal movement at the city’s edgeland and open the children’s eyes to how animals—deer, racoons, coyotes—use the land we ignore.

I was drawn to Brown’s book because I live at the suburban edge in Saskatoon, a place where deer ford the roads leading into my subdivision as they once forded rivers. I also live mere footsteps from a former chemical dump, cleaned up 25+ years ago but not remediated and whose name “the Buffer Zone” offers no clue to the environmental history that still lingers in this space. I envy Brown; he knew what he was getting into when he decided to build in an industrial area. When I learned the history of the land in my neighbourhood, I struggled with understanding the risk to my exploring children, how contaminants accumulate in soil, and how no one else seemed to want to know or remember the past. 

Brown explores the North American romantic longing for a frontier or real wilderness throughout the book, an idea he shatters by immersing himself in the biodiversity found at Austin’s urban fringe. Here in Canada, the pristine nature we imagine at National Parks will mean something different to future generations as land is slowly being evaluated and set aside for eleven National Urban Parks. Saskatoon’s Meewasin Valley is vying for National Urban Park status. These parks won’t have grand vistas; the land they claim is already degraded with failing biodiversity. How we understand nature as protected and outside of our cities will change with the creation of more National Urban Parks.

Just as Brown returns to his canoe time and again to see the urban river in a new way, he repeatedly returns to how we divide and classify land. He is interested in what land is for public use, or public conservation, and why. He repeatedly illustrates how land that is contaminated or unfit cycles through periods of exclusion and undervaluing and then remediation and gentrification as our cities in North America continue to sprawl outward.

Saskatoon faces urban sprawl and is happily dancing for federal dollars to increase housing through densification. Saskatoon’s creation of a Brownfield Reclamation Guidebook for developers and their success in remediation and development of River Landing are examples of what is possible. The guidebook provides just one example of a residential reclamation of a brownfield site, but more are likely hidden in plain sight, something Brown’s writing draws his reader back to again and again.

Saskatoon’s tight rental market and growing unhoused population may seem unrelated to Brown’s thoughtful focus on the urban edgelands, but that ignores the proliferation of homeless encampments mapped across Saskatoon. Where emergency housing and shelters will be located is a controversial topic and their impacts to residential neighbourhoods and subsequent increase in crime have led to NIMBYism.

It seems likely that remediated vacant lots in the downtown could be the answer to these ongoing problems of urban sprawl and housing issues. Saskatoon’s Public Library is precedent-setting for building on the site of a former gas station, a brownfield site. The purchase agreement required the seller of the site to fund the remediation expenses. Describing itself as, “an essential public greenspace in the heart of downtown,” Saskatoon Public Library is taking initiative to reclaim an empty lot and meet citizens’ needs. The library’s commitment to a downtown location and serving as a free and welcoming space to all citizens reflect its awareness of the importance of Third Spaces, or places outside of home and work or school where everyone is welcome to gather.

Brown’s focus on the ecology of empty lots highlights the often deadly consequences to wildlife and human interaction on city’s edgelands. Saskatoon’s populations of white-tailed deer and mule deer have created their own paths of safety through our built environment. University of Saskatchewan PhD student, Katie Harris, used motion-activated wildlife cameras to capture photos of wildlife in the city and build an urban wildlife databank to identify population trends. Our encounters with wildlife at the suburban edge or along the river valley are an invitation to see the city through other species’ eyes.

Interpreting Brown’s book here on Canada’s prairielands, two examples of this re-taking of urban edgelands come to mind. For over a decade, Jesse Salus, a land researcher has documented the encroachment of Calgary’s Ring Road and the alternate story of land that lies beneath the Calgary’s orderly public communication messages. Here in Saskatchewan, scholar Ken Wilson wrote Walking the Bypass, his exploration of Regina’s car-centric bypass and how his perspective changed as these non-spaces became places the more time he spent there. I too have learned this lesson while exploring Saskatoon’s edgelands: as the seasons change, the unknown becomes familiar. Perhaps this is the most valuable lesson that A Natural History of Empty Lots offers its Canadian readers: our cities are also filled with empty lots, and they are often invisible to us, but if we explore them, if we walk these non-spaces, they become a place we will want to return to again and again. Brown’s book will be a field guide to doing just that.

Feature Image: “geese, fence, lot” by Beaulawrence is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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Carmen Gilmore

Carmen Gilmore is a Saskatoon-based independent scholar and writer. She is interested in place-based storytelling and how we both shape the land and how the land shapes us. Her public policy background in energy and environmental issues influences her current research.

Latest posts by Carmen Gilmore (see all)

• From Vacant to Vital: Rethinking the Role of Empty Lots in North American Cities - February 20, 2025