ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the urban periphery as a specific place, and the design and aesthetics of the built environment, both in the city in general and in the periphery in particular. It demonstrates what these different perceptions can tell us about space and place in the periphery today. Michael Dear has differentiated three distinct meanings of the term 'postmodernism' or 'postmodern': as epoch, as method and as style, parallel to the ideas of context, method and concrete experience. The postmodern epoch and the postmodern periphery, or the postmodern city as a whole, as a time and space of contradictions, plurality and fluidity, it becomes obvious that within it will find a variety of different aesthetics, the term aesthetics in the sense of a particular taste or style. Conceptualizing the periphery as a postmodern space in the making is a theoretical challenge just as designing the periphery is an aesthetic challenge that also refers to the life world dimension.
