ABSTRACT
Large parts of Europe and the developed world are not quite urban or rural, but somewhere between – an emerging ‘peri-urban’ landscape, in the fringes and hinterlands of cities and city-regions. This reflects a more networked mobile society, but one which also needs new kinds of local character and quality of life. The frequently rapid changes in such areas bring both problems and opportunities in urban ecology – so much that we could propose an extended concept of ‘peri-urban ecology’. In the fringes and hinterlands of most cities there are typical challenges which compound together – climate change impacts and soil erosion, road traffic, ageing population, landscape stress, urban-rural migration, farm restructuring, tourism impacts and pressure for urban development. Such a peri-urban space – a ‘metro-scape’ – may be the most common type of living and working situation in the twenty-first century. In some parts of the world it will be an arena for affluence and conspicuous consumption. In others it will be a fractured zone of poverty and displacement, a front line between the problems of the city and the countryside. Underlying this is the changing nature of the city and urban expansion itself. As well as the physical growth of urban form, there is a wider economic and social dynamic of change, across the whole global urban system. This in turn changes the relationship between urban and rural, and between ‘urban form’ and ‘urban ecology’. A new kind of geography begins to emerge, looking beyond the conventional divide of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’, to a territorial perspective in which the ‘peri-urban’ is the central feature. Such ‘peri-urban’ territories are generally in a state of rapid flux and structural transition. We can identify at least three types of dynamic change at work:
• Metropol-ization: an ‘urban infrastructure’ transition which is diffused and networked across wider peri-urban and rural areas;
• ‘Cognitive capitalism’: a ‘cultural-structural’ transition – new patterns of globalizing economic and social activities and divisions;
• Peri-urban ecology, or a spatial ‘green infrastructure’ transition. This reflects a countervailing force of ‘localization’, and changing social and cultural relationships between a more affluent urbanized population and its landscape surroundings.
