Urban peripheries: The political dynamics of planning projects

The urban periphery has become a highly dynamic space. The consolidation of polycentric urban patterns and the emergence of outer urban poles raise fundamental questions for planners. Spatial planning needs to redefine intervention approaches and instruments to address new spatial dynamics in times of weaker economic growth, stable real-estate markets, and post-modern household life choices. The innovative potential of the periphery lies in two particular challenges. First, there is a need to experiment, define, activate, and institutionalize new spatial qualities in these outer areas. Second, there is a need to achieve better coordination of spatial policies across jurisdictional borders and to institutionalize polycentric spatial concepts.
The thesis investigates the political processes that drive the redevelopment of the urban periphery. It explores how major planning agents reconfigure their relationships in order to respond to changed symmetries between core locations and peripheral zones. It aims at understanding why, given the spatial, functional, and economic conditions of today’s metropolitan areas, we see particular planning approaches to peripheral development occur while others fail to address the challenges of collective action. It hypothesizes that more progressive planning concepts and the strategies of outer areas depend on the realignment of core municipality planning strategies and national planning policies with regional market investment strategies.