ABSTRACT
Various competing models of development for Alpine space have been proposed and applied; however, as a general trend, the infrastructures of physical and informational mobility of the industrial and post-industrial capitalist model seem to finally have overcome all resistance and alternatives, at least on a large scale. This chapter focuses on one spatial and territorial outcome of such processes in the Alps, turning to the case of suburbanization, or peri-urbanization. It presents the results of a fieldwork focused on the experience of settlement and the relationship between older and newer inhabitants in the Alpine suburbs surrounding Trento. The chapter suggests a research approach to the Alpine suburb as a peculiar type of urban interstice rather than a margin or periphery. The Alpine suburb constitutes a sort of urban fringe, a blurred borderland where different territorial components and modalities intermingle.
