ABSTRACT
With increasing urbanization and the rise of the private automobile, peri-urban development accelerated in the Western world in the early twentieth century. Today, peri-urban landscapes are a global phenomenon spurring land-use conflicts and challenging centuries-old ideas and ideals of city and country. Peri-urban landscapes were mainly regarded as a problem within research and planning during most of the twentieth century, but a paradigm shift occurred during its last decade with the acknowledgement of the potential of hybrid landscapes. Although the study of peri-urban landscape is an interdisciplinary and scattered field (compare the literature examined in reviews by Meeus and Gulinck 2008, Simon 2008, Taylor 2011), this chapter aims for a comprehensive overview. The chapter discusses the peri-urban concept, introduces the peri-urban discourse in (primarily) Western countries, presents key recent works in landscape studies and, finally, argues the fruitfulness of detailed and critical studies of hybrid landscapes.
