Floyd Bennett Field, an Urban National Park in Brooklyn, New York is a peripheral and patchy landscape whose regulatory and operational vagueness has led to the emergence of novel ecological and social occurrences on the old runways.

This decommissioned airfield challenges our notions of what a natural landscape is and how it functions. This research aims to characterize Floyd Bennett Field as a ‘Fourth Nature’ preserve, where the plant community associations and recreational uses by the public constitute new forms of ‘wildness’ steeped in an urban context. Drawing from the disciplines of landscape architecture and urban ecology, this research elucidates the heterogeneity of this terrain and speculates on how this quality can inform spatial decisions and management practices in an urban national park.