Dynamics of Periphery

Figure 3. Peripheries as new treasure troves, spaces for experimentation and creative recycling.
Graphic: Jessica Smeralda Oliva
We need to change our viewpoint on peripheries, leaving behind the stereotyped image that
commonly marks them as places of social conflicts and troubles, of mono-functionality and economic
depression, of aesthetic poverty and physical degradation, even if these characteristics
are often present. But peripheries are to be intended as the new treasure troves of future human
settlements, recognizing in their criticalities and transformation potential the opportunity to rethink
a new relationship between city and landscape, between humans and nature. Far from being
spaces of anonymity, possibly labelled as “non-places”, peripheries are precious places of identity
formation, offering space for experimentation. Often denoted by a more transformable and
mouldable fabric, peripheries are meant as spatial resources to explore and tackle social, environmental,
ecological, and economic challenges of our urban time. Post-crisis and global change
peripheries make room for creative recycling of unused buildings, activating new productive
cycles and relational landscapes, creating new co-managed green spaces, using the existing underused
surfaces for urban agriculture, transforming derelict buildings through physical retrofitting
and functional densification, providing services and accessibility, giving new sense and identity
to public space, valorising open space as integration place for communities, and interconnecting
the human and the natural habitat.
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