Peripheries - Peripherocene — Studio Andreas Lechner

Peripheries – Peripherocene

The Urban Peripheries in the Era of the Anthropocene is a cooperative research project of Cameron McEwan (Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne) & Andreas Lechner (TU Graz). A Northumbria University funded project, Peripherocene investigated the corollary between Anthropocenic forces and the production of peripheral urban space. It produced a portfolio of drawings, texts, and founded an international network. Peripherocene concluded with a symposium in Newcastle in 2023. Cameron and Andreas then chaired a thematic session on “Peripheries” at the AHRA 2023 conference Situated Ecologies of Care at Portsmouth School of Architecture, UK and are now editing a Special Issue of The Journal of Architecture slated for 2026.

︎︎︎How can the peripheral imaginary be drawn out?

Foto: Andreas Lechner, Aldo Rossi‘s extension of the cemetary Ponte Sesto in Rozzan with G. Da Pozzo, F. S. Fera (1989-1995), Southern periphery of Milan, 2023.

In The Architecture of the City Aldo Rossi argued that the city is the site of collective memory. For Rossi, historical artefacts, typologies, and urban structure embodied an “urban imaginary.” He was writing at a time of urban transition and generally, but not exclusively, focused on the historical centre. Today, notions of “centre” and “city” as identifiable entity have given way to more dynamic and heterogeneous processes of urbanisation and an extending urban periphery. Yet it is possible to argue that peripheries also have a collective memory, a history, and a typological structure. With Georges Perec in mind, the periphery may be the banal, the common, the habitual, and therefore somehow central to collective life – a place of peripheral monuments that embody a peripheral imaginary.

What are the typologies and structures that situate the peripheral imaginary. If Rossi was interested in defining categories that helped understand the city [artefact, locus, type, monument, permanence, collective memory, city as historical text], what are the interpretive categories needed to understand the periphery? Beyond Rossi, who might be the principal critical reference points? What are the modes of representation that articulate the peripheral imaginary? How can the peripheral imaginary be drawn out?

Core Group 2023

Cameron McEwan [Northumbria University + AE Foundation]
Andreas Lechner [TU Graz + Studio Andreas Lechner]
Elisa Iturbe [Cooper Union + Outside Development]
Joe Wojewoda [Northumbria University]
Lee Ann McIlroy [Northumbria University + University of Dundee]
Lorens Holm [University of Dundee]
Neil Gillespie [Reiach & Hall + Scott Sutherland School of Architecture]
Sandra Bartoli [Büros für Konstruktivismus + Munich University of Applied Sciences]
Silvan Linden [Büros für Konstruktivismus]
Yamina Saheb [OpenExp]

2023, May 11
HS L – Alte Technik, Lessingstraße 25/I, TU Graz
Cameron McEwan:
Peripheries: The Urban Periphery in the Era of the Anthropocene

Cameron McEwan is associate professor of architecture at Northumbria University, UK. Cameron is an architectural theorist, educator, and director of the AE Foundation. Cameron’s research focuses on the relationship between architectural typology, representation, and subjectivity to engage critical approaches to the urban/Anthropocene question. His work appears in journals and venues, including: Archnet-IJAR, Architecture and Culture, arq, Drawing On, GAM, JAE, Lo Squaderno, MONU, the Venice International Architecture Biennale and elsewhere. Cameron’s editorial projects include Accounts (Pelinu, 2019); Architecture and Collective Life (Architecture and Culture, 2020); and Care and Critical Action (Lo Squaderno, 2023). Cameron’s book Analogical City was published with Punctum in 2024.

The city spills into the wilderness, unruly peripheries expand, nature is consumed. The urban to nature divide is ever less clear, even if we live in an era of intense urbanisation and uneven development. Today, the periphery is fast becoming the place where most of the global population lives, loves, and often loathes. The periphery is everything, everywhere, and all at once: suburbs, exurbs, fringes, edges, favelas, sprawl, infrastructure, old villages, new towns, fields, the zone; a terrain vague; ecologies, institutions, politics, typologies, human and non-human voices. If the typical city is a coherent hierarchy of figure and ground, monuments and fabric; the periphery is sometimes all figure, sometimes all ground, often an entangled randomness. Contrary to narratives that the periphery is bland, commodified, declining, or remote—it is all these things and none of them—this call for papers aims to learn from the periphery.

How are "peripheries" formed? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripherization? Urban studies today are more and more confronted with processes of extended urbanization that evolve far beyond cities and agglomerations: Novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and remote landscapes, challenging inherited notions of the urban as a contained and dense type of settlement. While certain areas of extensive urbanization are experiencing strong economic growth, others are affected by processes of peripheralization, particularly less accessible and thinly populated areas, mountainous and archipelagic regions, and areas with weak regional centralities. As a result, many regions are experiencing profound socioeconomic and environmental transformation, loss and relocation of economic activity, and selective emigration, leading to economic marginalization and depopulation, with permanent settlements eroding and seasonal or sporadic movements of people into and out of central urban areas becoming more prevalent. The emergence of such areas is fueled by economic, environmental, or health crises that provide the rationale for policies of exceptions that eventually become more permanent, often amplifying processes of extended urbanization and peripherization.

We ask, how the inherently relative and relational concept of periphery might help us to again critically reconsider the hybrid landscape of fragmented and mixed urban and rural characteristics; how its historical production as form and idea, might contribute to new urban forms and strategies, modes of representation, critical narratives, and conceptual frameworks under today’s pressing issues such as urbanisation, care, spatial justice, resilience, and the climate crisis. These observations argue for a radical reimagination of the experience of the periphery at different spatial scales. Peripherization is not a static spatial condition, but a dynamic process characterized by uneven urbanization and complex multiscale relationships. Also in demand are studies that question and renew existing methods and forms of theorizing and promote decentered perspectives on the urban. We aim to build a spatial, representational, and theoretical lexicon on peripheries that take carbon modernity’s orders, asymmetries and hinterlands into account. We believe that architecture's expertise as a thoroughly hybrid practice – teaching, researching, publishing and building – are central to tackling the critical futures of how to more evenly and justly share exisiting resources across culture/nature and urban/rural divisions. We seek contributions which address the following themes and questions; and which may range across, not only within, these categories:

Voices from the periphery

What are the principle social, economic, and political ideas or ideals ascribed to the periphery; and how are they manifest in the urban and regional structure of peripheries? Who cares for the periphery? What are the narratives of love and loathing of the periphery? Who is the subject of the periphery? Who occupies the periphery? How might the centre and periphery condition be rethought? What is the collective life of peripheries?

Picturing the periphery

What expression does the periphery take? What is the formal, typological, and spatial ordering of peripheries? What might be the social and historical production of the periphery as form, image, and idea? What may be the peripheral monuments of today and the future? How to picture the periphery, to draw the periphery, to inventively represent peripheral conditions?

Anthropocenic periphery

How are peripheries reconfigured by imagination, infrastructures, institutions, knowledge, commons, energy, labour, monuments, nature, otherness, property, and their entanglements under the pressure of the Anthropocene––the current age when social and natural forces wrap the planet? What is the corollary between the Anthropocene and the production of peripheral urban space? What are the conceptual frameworks, spatial models, and critical genealogies needed to understand the periphery under the pressure of the Anthropocene?