Territorial Justice

Fringe Conditions
Report from
the Edge of the City
Urban Reports
Text Viviana Rubbo
Urban development is currently experiencing a new phase: what emerges today with increasing force
are issues that concern the relationship between urban and rural, center and periphery, connectivity and inclusiveness
and, everywhere in Europe, those territories at the fringes urge attention and forward-looking planning
approaches to master present and future urban dynamics. In cities all over the world government responsibility
concerning city development is shrinking and global flows of capitals and private investments are finding their way
into property developments. “The parallel raising of both metropolitan and local scales (globalization and decentralization)
facing each other, competing, and sometimes mixing, recompose territories and powers.” 1
“Report from the Edge of the City” is a project of documentary photography that investigates the administrative
limits of a city in relation to its actual “borders:” those areas at the fringes—industrial areas, brownfields, port
areas, green fields, suburban neighborhoods, productive lands—that have become the arenas in which major urban
territorial reconfigurations are taking place. Designed by Urban Reports, a group of architect-photographers based
in different cities in Europe, this project is the product of an experimental and multifaceted cooperation that uses
photography as a tool for both reading contemporary territorial identity and providing visual evidence of how the
habits of human movement, how society and economy may influence and affect our European urban landscapes.
With the ambition to document and better understand phenomena such as the acceleration of urban
dynamics, territorial widening and increasing governance and planning complexity, this photographic documentation
offers material from the four cities where the project started—Milan, Turin, Rotterdam and Madrid—thus enabling a
comparison of city boundaries at the European level. ■
1 Viviana Rubbo, Michel Sudarskis and Lola Davidson, “Discomfort of the Present, Relief of the Future,” in RealCorp 2013,
ed. Manfred Schrenk, Vasily V. Popovich, Peter Zeile and Pietro Elisei (Rome, 2013), 1428.
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