Peripheries – Peripherocene

Rereading the Urban Periphery in the Age of the Anthropocene

Forthcoming Special Issue of RIBA’s The Journal of Architecture (2026) edited by Cameron McEwan (Northumbria University) & Andreas Lechner (TU Graz)

Georges Perec, “Approaches to What? The Infra-Ordinary,”  1973.


Peripheries – Peripherocene is a collaborative research initiative led by Cameron McEwan (Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne) and Andreas Lechner (TU Graz), which investigates the dynamic intersections between Anthropocenic conditions and the spatial, social, and conceptual production of urban peripheries. Launched with a symposium in Newcastle in 2023 and further explored in the thematic session “Peripheries” at the AHRA 2023 Conference: Situated Ecologies of Care (University of Portsmouth), the project is currently preparing a Special Issue of The Journal of Architecture (RIBA), to be published in 2026.

Today’s peripheries are plural and planetary: encompassing suburbs, exurbs, favelas, informal settlements, logistics zones, old villages, and new towns. They form what Ignasi de Solà-Morales called terrain vague—ambiguous spaces full of latent potential (Solà-Morales, 1995). These geographies are shaped by contradictory forces of capital, migration, ecology, infrastructure, and state control. As such, the periphery is not a homogeneous condition but a multifaceted and dynamic terrain. Processes of peripherization—defined by uneven development, environmental degradation, and spatial marginalization—are exacerbated by crises of capitalism, climate, and care (Kühn, 2014). These processes increasingly shape rural and remote territories far beyond metropolitan cores, creating hybrid zones of agriculture, extractivism, and speculative development.

In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi proposed the city as a locus of collective memory, with urban artifacts, typologies, and structures expressing an “urban imaginary” (Rossi, 1982). While his analysis emphasized the historical city centre, the twenty-first century presents a different urban paradigm where the rigid dichotomies of centre and periphery have dissolved into sprawling, discontinuous, and hybridized landscapes shaped by processes of extended urbanisation (Brenner & Schmid, 2015). The periphery, long seen as residual or secondary, increasingly defines the dominant condition of contemporary urban life. Georges Perec’s attention to the everyday, the banal, and the habitual (Perec, 1997) compels us to reconsider peripheral territories as primary expressions of collective life, containing their own monuments, memories, and spatial logics.

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Key Research Questions

Our research poses urgent and generative questions:

1. What is the Peripheral Imaginary?
If Rossi employed categories such as type, locus, permanence, and monument to understand the city, what interpretive tools can help us theorize the periphery? What are the typologies, symbols, and spatial figures that shape peripheral imaginaries?

2. What Constitutes Peripheral Memory and Identity?
Peripheries, too, are carriers of memory and history. How do built forms and urban patterns reflect the lived experience of peripheral life? Who remembers the periphery, and how?

3. How Are Peripheries Reconfigured in the Anthropocene?
The Anthropocene—a term marking the deep entanglement of natural and human systems (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Haraway, 2016)—challenges traditional urban categories. How are peripheries transformed by infrastructural intensification, resource extraction, environmental displacement, and new forms of political governance?

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Theoretical Contributions and Methods

We seek to build a spatial, representational, and theoretical lexicon on peripheries that integrates insights from architecture, urban theory, political ecology, and environmental humanities.

Key contributions will explore:

Extended Urbanisation: Following Brenner and Schmid (2015), we conceptualize the periphery as integral to global urban restructuring, including hinterlands, supply chains, and sites of dispossession.

Planetary Urbanism: Urbanization is no longer confined to cities; it is a planetary process (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020).

Peripheral Monuments: New typologies and icons emerge not from central institutions but from infrastructural, vernacular, or marginal architectures (Lechner, 2021).
Critical Representation: From cartography to photography, we explore visual and conceptual strategies to render the invisible geographies of the periphery visible and legible (Corner, 1999).

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Emerging Themes and Calls for Contribution

Voices from the Periphery:
Who inhabits, governs, and narrates the periphery?How do political and economic systems create peripheral conditions?What affective registers—love, loathing, longing—emerge in the lived experiences of peripheral life?

Picturing the Periphery:What are the visual, formal, and typological manifestations of the periphery?How can peripheries be drawn, photographed, mapped, or modelled to capture their complexity?What are the representational tools required for a “critical cartography” of peripheral space?
The Anthropocenic Periphery

How do infrastructures, ecologies, and institutions produce peripheries under Anthropocenic pressures?
What new models of settlement, adaptation, and resistance emerge in these zones?
How do notions of care, resilience, and spatial justice inform our understanding of peripheries?

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?

Core Group:

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]