Dynamics of Periphery

Figure 1. Creative Clusters Vision, metropolitan region Hannover
Braunschweig, Göttingen, Wolfsburg. Graphic: Jan Philipp
Drude, Raphaela Djalili, Lisa Iglseder, Valentin Zellmer, LUH
Regionales Bauen und Siedlungsplanung 2017
At least since the economic crisis of 2008, from which Europe appears to be recovering only
now, ten years later, our notion of innovation has been enriched by a spatial focus. This focus has
entailed merging, superimposing, and hybridising innovations in technology and digitalisation with
the founding of social and cultural communities, and with—as is the aim of Dynamics of Periphery
to show—new qualities in lived space and in territories. Parallel to the increased consciousness
of spatial change, these new qualities evolved in different velocities with new connotations: slow,
which also assumes advantages for supporting resilience; fast, opening up to a targeted use of
timeframes and temporality. Dynamic factors, dynamic constellations, and dynamic processes
nevertheless remain bound to and shed light on cultural, social, and economic frameworks in
which spatial transformation is constructed and influences visions of life. In urbanism (used as
term for a projective approach) over the last ten years, most voices kept to a mind-set and to
concepts that took the city as a starting point—even if the very idea of city has, since globalisation
in the nineteen-nineties, finally become blurred, along with that the assumption of modernism that
dynamics are only bound to clustering and to centres of ever larger size. Parallel to a multiplicity of
spatial phenomena, structures, and multi-actor constellations, the notion of dynamic positioning in
space has also been exponentially extended (the flat world of digitalisation and mobility) and, at the
same time, limited, as it has become re-centred for many people and in many aspects. On the one
hand, this is the hypothesis of a (mostly silent) process of powerful centralisation, and on the other,
a search to actively—in a larger extension—link to new modes of shaping nodes and networks
between space and society that Dynamics of Periphery aims to address. This background is also
the reason we have constructed this book as an atlas: to discover new territories of spatial change.
It displays integrative process-design, pro-active context-building, and conceptual narratives as
INTRODUCTION
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