ABSTRACT
The rural-urban fringe has often been conceived as a zone in transition: a space torn between its rural past and its urban future—a phase’ rather than a place’. Spatial planning has played an important part in consolidating this perception. The essential feature of planning has been to create single-purpose spaces, and therefore the fringe with its fragmented urban and rural characteristics has come to be seen as a transient stage, corresponding to what Marc Augé has identified as ‘non-places’. In recent years, scholars working in the fields of landscape studies, planning and geography have taken an intense interest in questions concerning the rural-urban fringe. Most of the scholars working on the theme have examined the fringe in the present-day context, and those few who have chosen a historical approach have usually focused on the last 60–70 years. However, the rural-urban fringe is not a new phenomenon. As David Thomas has stated, ‘Like the poor, the rural-urban fringe we have always had with us’. By using Helsinki as a case, this chapter examines the inner urban fringe as both a phase and a place in the Nordic countries from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The first aim of this chapter is to look at how the inner urban fringe was defined and redefined when Helsinki underwent urbanization, industrialization and de-industrialization. In periods of urban growth, the urban fringe is always subject to ambitious development projects, but in many cases these plans are delayed, and many fringe areas are left in a ‘state of waiting’ for years, even decades. The second key question of this chapter concerns what was happening in the inner urban fringe while awaiting such redevelopment, how its perception and meaning were continuously redefined and renegotiated, and how these developments ‘in the meantime’ influenced the later development of the fringe.
