A view from the top - l'espace periurbain

The pics below were taken recently (24th June 2013), showing the peri-urban space of the Grand Duchy in the eastern part of the country, a few kilometres east of the capital city.   

They reveal two significant features of the country's built environment: one is the neither urban nor rural 'character' - if such thing can be attributed to buildings and 'space' at all. It pretty much reveals what the idea of the urban landscape ('Stadtlandschaft') is about. The other includes most recent buildings -- all multi-storey and probably managed by developers, for urbanites seeking a somehow rural setting for practising their more or less urban lifestyle.

The question will be how to assess all this - the setting, the buildings, the practices - in terms of sustainability. According to a growing body of literature, it became quite clear that an essentialist view of physical space as the main explaining force of human behaviour (and thus of 'compact cities' as the central requirement for achieving sustainability in spatial or urban regards) does not work out. This proposition was fundamentally challenged e.g. by a recent paper from Marcial H.  Echenique, Anthony J. Hargreaves, Gordon Mitchell and Anil Namdeo: Growing cities sustainably. Does urban form really matter?', published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (APA) vol. 78 (2), in Spring 2012.

The interesting thing with this paper is not only that it actually dismantled the compact city-hypothesis, which others such as the late Mike Breheny and colleagues had already been doing a decade earlier; it is also no surprise given geographers' perspectives on contemporary regions being 'unbound', fluid, and difficult to demarcate (see Ash Amin's paper on 'Regions unbound' in the Swedish Geografiska Annaler B, 2004. The most striking issue was that the paper received unusually harsh comments from the planners' community, bemoaning that one (APA) must not publish things that put the common ground of beliefs and traditions of the community into question.
In order to make a productive sense out of this controversy, there are serious questions coming up once studying regions in both conceptual and strategic regards that need to be discussed:
- the question what a 'region' is, and how it can be properly approached in methodological terms. See the very instructive issue of the Regional Studies journal (vol. 47, 1, January 2013) on 'regional worlds';
- the question to what extent this peri-urban setting can be used (and accepted) as a starting point for sustainability, rather than to address the peri-urban with recipes that were taken from the urban realm;
- the question in what way diverging opinions, based on arguments well thought of, can be taken into account, in order to bring an open, constructive and critical debate forward, rather than to determine the style of thought in a top-down manner.
We (the SUSTAIN_GOV project) will tie in with this particular controversy by presenting a paper at this year's 'Spaces & Flows'-Conference, which takes place in the end of November in Amsterdam, on how to deal with spatial fragmentation -- particularly once strategies of spatial integration might no longer be appropriate and effective.