Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Publication Title

Landscape Research

ISSN/ISBN

0142-6397

Volume

37

Issue

4

First Page

395

Last Page

398

DOI

10.1080/01426397.2012.692776

Keywords

peri-urban, sprawl, landscape

Abstract

Hybrid landscapes at the urban edge have been regarded as an intractable problem within modern planning for more than a century (Qvistrom, in press). An early commentary on urban sprawl by Benton MacKaye depicts urban edge landscapes as ‘‘not city, not country, but wilderness—the wilderness not of an integrated ordered nature, but of a standardized, unordered civilization’’ (1928, p. 160). As Vicenzotti and Trepl (2009) and De Block (2011) illustrate, similarly dramatic and disapproving representations of peri-urban landscapes have been a significant part of planning discourse during the twentieth century. Attempts to stigmatise these areas have usually been supported by arguments echoing Raymond Unwin and his generation of planners, calling for orderly alignments of city and culture, nature and country according to the modern cosmology.

In recent years, however, alternative interpretations of the urban fringe have evolved, arguing for the recognition of specific values in these vernacular landscapes (e.g. De Block, 2011; Furuseth & Lapping, 1999; Gallent et al., 2007; Masuda & Garvin, 2008; Woods, 2009). One of the values brought forward in this new approach to sprawl landscapes is the ability to question the modern polarities of urban and rural. When brought into a planning discourse, this reinterpretation of the urban fringe is a paradigmatic turn, especially given that the majority of cases that consider the peri-urban interface do so in the context of attempting to constrain ‘urban sprawl’ by invoking the traditional poles of urban and rural. However, despite some signs of a shift toward more nuanced accounts of the hybrid nature of the peri-urban interface, it remains to be seen how the recognition of ongoing negotiation of the meaning of and relationship between urban and rural will be implemented in the actual development and ongoing management of peri-urban landscapes in question. Further, even if the shift is paradigmatic regarding the conceptualisation of peri-urban landscapes, the actual landscapes don’t do paradigmatic turns or Copernican shifts. Rather, new ideas are more likely to be added to the layers of former discourses and plans which are still affecting the character of the landscape, even as they are replaced by emerging different landscape practices (see Masuda & Garvin, 2008). Without investigations into the complex interplay between previous plans and landscape change that has occurred during the twentieth century, new ideas about the fringe are likely to founder and fail. This special section argues that we need to explore the factors and decision-making processes that have enabled and constrained the way that landscapes at the urban edge have been shaped, and also to explore the implications of understanding these peri-urban planning histories from different perspectives.

This special section represents one chapter in a series of scholarly conversations on the topic of how academic work on peri-urban landscapes can combine empirical and theoretical approaches to understand peri-urban places and processes in less dogmatic ways (see also Cadieux & Hurley, 2011; Qvistrom & Saltzman, 2008). The three articles presented here combine the approaches of planning history and landscape studies to examine what was intended for a certain set of European peri-urban landscapes in the early- and mid-twentieth century, and how those plans played out—both in the environment and in our understanding of the landscape. These articles focus primarily on the importance of rural and urban ideals within transport and regional planning. The papers were originally presented at the Istanbul conference of the International Planning History Society in July 2010.

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