What does the future of urbanised territories of medium density look like? “Transforming Peripheries”, the new online magazine – a joint venture of urbanes.land and topos – strives to find answers to this question. It concentrates knowledge about urbanised territories and connects the realms of academics and practitioners across borders, sectors and regions.
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Since the UN announced that the majority of humankind lives in urban areas, we have allowed a single vision to become the dominant answer to future challenges: The idea of the resilient urban body. This reduction misses a large potential of urbanised territories that are not directly ascertainable by a single frame. All over Europe a long history of shared territorial responsibility has fostered co-penetrating rural/urban-realms that have long outgrown the traditional dichotomy of city/countryside. A large segment of Europe’s population lives in these rich conditions – their multifaceted potential for resilient development still has to be unlocked, however.
“Manifold novel expressions of the urban as much as the rural, and mixed and hybrid conditions profit from multiple interdependencies”
Urbanised territories are at the heart of Europe’s industrial production; they are hubs for logistics and data, and simultaneously green lungs and a spatial reserve for sustaining development in the energy and food sector. Manifold novel expressions of the urban as much as the rural, and mixed and hybrid conditions profit from multiple interdependencies. Local identities have often shifted and new modes of production, movement and ownership flourish. Initiatives, both bottom-up and top-down, have emerged across the continent, covertly questioning ideologies of urban promise and countryside plight. They can drive new models of balanced, circular and equal trading, working and living systems and inspire additional ways of comprehensive transition.
Looking from the in – rather than the outside, from the existing and not the expanding – the aim of the joint effort of urbanes.land and topos is to concentrate existing knowledge about these urbanised territories and connect the realms of academics and practitioners across borders, sectors and regions. For one year, this “transforming peripheries” magazine will act as a platform for exchange and connection. It will share best-practice strategies, reflect on what works, and provide levers to influence the spatial development agendas of policy makers, urban planners, business leaders, academics and community groups alike. We encourage and welcome all parties to add, dissent or comment on the magazine. Dynamic exchange, instant reflection and a broad spectrum of different angles are some of the best things an online magazine can offer.
“The aim of the joint effort of urbanes.land and topos is to concentrate existing knowledge about urbanised territories”
Understanding and working with the heterogeneity of urbanised territories requires crossing both disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Finding categories with which to dissect the contributions has proved to be a conflictive task. Still, in order to create a structure of reference, we’ve established four narrative threads that will lead us through this year of continuous discoveries: Character will enable us to look at originality and tradition, at cataclysms for people and society and the active role of inhabitants in transformation processes. Structure will highlight the built and unbuilt dimensions of space and infrastructure on regional and local levels. In Levers we will collect different impulses of transformative approaches and development strategies, while Strategies will illuminate tangible projects, as well as administrative and institutional best-practices.
“The magazine is a spin-off of the 2019 Urban Land Conference in Ulm”
The transforming peripheries magazine is a spin-off of the 2019 Urban Land Conference in Ulm. The research and transfer initiative urbanes.land started out there to connect European knowledge and to transfer some findings to regional stakeholders. To extend and perpetuate this effort, topos now complements the specialists perspective with journalistic proficiency – covering the topics holistically and with love to detail. Idea, conceptualization and roll-out of this magazine have happened in what sometimes seemed to be diverging chapters of public life worldwide. Now, the kick-off coincides with the careful rediscovery of the public realm and reinstating economic functions by individuals, companies and policy-makers. With curiosity and a sense of hope, we and all contributors integrate this challenge among climate resilience, social equality and livability debates that will not stop exerting pressure on regions and cities around the world.
Visit us at https://urbanesland.toposmagazine.com/
“Transforming Peripheries” was the title of an international conference held in September 2019 at the former University of the Arts and Design in Ulm, Germany. Attended by a number of renowned experts in the field, the conference explored spaces that are neither city nor country and for which we still lack models that could provide lasting guidance for the future.
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Challenges of urban lands
Among the featured speakers were Christian Schmid, Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich, Tom Holbrook, founding principal of the London architectural office 5th Studio, Georgeen Theodore, a partner in the architecture and urban design firm Interboro in Brooklyn, Paola Viganò, Professor of Urbanism in Venice and Lausanne, and Andreas Hofer, Director of the IBA’27 Stuttgart City-Region.
The conference produced a multitude of new insights: Among the crucial challenges of “urban lands” are the development of new mobility concepts and the reduction of land consumption per capita, which is still disproportionately high. At the current moment, the car continues to be the no. 1 means of transportation just as the land-consuming single-family home continues to be the most desired form of housing. It is the lack of attractive alternatives why these trends have not been broken
The conference was the opening event of a research and transfer initiative directed by Ute Meyer, Professor for Urban Planning and Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Biberach. Titled “urbanes.land”. The goal of the conference as well as of further planned activities and events is to engender intensive exchanges with the sciences, political and economic stakeholders, as well as civil society agents. Another major goal of the initiative is to develop sustainable future-oriented solutions. We spoke to Professor Ute Meyer, initiator and director of the Urban Land Research and Transfer Initiative, about controversial aspects of the topic, research goals and the results of the conference.
Interview with Ute Meyer
Tanja Gallenmüller: Prof. Meyer, there are a number of different terms that have currency today – Zwischenstadt, periphery, urban land –, regardless of which one of them one uses, the topic is not new. Why do spaces that are neither urban nor rural continue to evoke our interest and why have they, from a planning perspective, become potentially more important than ever?
Ute Meyer: You are certainly right: the topic is not new. Urbanists in many European countries have been working on this since the 1990s. That’s another reason why we organized this conference However, the various potentials of such settlement areas that are, in our understanding, neither truly “urban” nor distinctly “rural”, have been much less researched than those of traditional core settlement areas. What we lack in particular are models for how the highly diverse functional mix of these spaces can be used effectively, and how we can open them up as a reserve for sustainable spatial development.
Tanja Gallenmüller: Your focus is not on the big urban centres and their regions but on smaller and mid-sized cities such as the Ulm region in southern Germany. Where are the differences and what constitutes the specific challenges of Ulm, both city and region?
Ute Meyer: Our research addresses the “urban land” through a number of highly divergent approaches. One important focus is indeed on spaces characterized by small and mid-sized urban centres, such as the Ulm – Lake Constance region. But we also have other projects located at the edges of metropolitan regions, such as Brussels or Riga, which are structurally very similar. The Ulm–Lake Constance region does of course play a special role because it is right on our doorstep. This enables us to establish, in ways that are uncomplicated, important cooperation projects between the universities of the region, policy makers, business leaders and local community groups. And our “home region” is of special interest to us for other reasons as well: compared to the German national average, this is a particularly wealthy region. This circumstance is, for one, a reflection of certain historical origins, i.e. the autonomy of relatively small cities that became independent early on. It is also a region that can serve as a model for cooperation at a regional level.
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Tanja Gallenmüller: What are, in your eyes, the new and the most important insights gained from the “Urban Land” conference, at a general level as well as with regard to Ulm?
Ute Meyer: There are three points to be made:
- There is a lot of available knowledge about the structural characteristics, but also about economic and social aspects of urban land all across Europe. This knowledge is being insufficiently distributed via the existing networks and above all there it isn’t nearly sufficiently available to those who do the planning.
- All speakers were approving of our approach and viewed it as a novel way to look for levers through which the potentials of settlement areas can be used for sustainable development. The participants too were laudatory of this aspect. We will build on these efforts and feel encouraged to expand the transfer initiative. Useful levers could be functional neighbourhoods (proximities), finite resources (mobility, water, land…) as well as new forms of cooperation and financing models.
- It doesn’t always have to be the big cities that take a pioneering role. This is in fact a realization – according to the feedback we received – that many of the participants took home with them.
