Session #138

– Paper Presentations –

The city spills into the wilderness, unruly peripheries expand, nature is consumed. The urban to nature partition is ever less clear, even if we live in an era of intense and uneven urbanisation. Today, the periphery is fast becoming the place where most of the global population lives, loves, and often loathes. Nevertheless, urban peripheries remain surprisingly under researched. If the typical city is a coherent hierarchy of figure and ground, monuments and fabric; the periphery is sometimes all figure, sometimes all ground, often an entangled randomness. We are interested in the entanglements of peripheral conditions: suburbs, exurbs, fringes, edges, favelas, sprawl, infrastructure, agriculture, old villages, new towns, fields; the terrain vague; their ecologies, images, institutions, politics, typologies, human and non-human subjects. Contrary to narratives that the periphery is bland, commodified, declining, or remote—it is all these things and none of them—we aim to draw attention to the periphery and to learn from the periphery.

This paper session asks: How is the periphery reconfigured against collective life, culture, grids, history, housing, imagination, infrastructures, institutions, labour, media, monuments, nature, otherness, places and non-places, repetition, technology, and beauty? How is the periphery cultivated, occupied, and organised? What expression does the periphery take; formal, spatial, conceptual, typological? Who cares for the periphery? What are the narratives of love and loathing of the periphery? How to draw the periphery?

For this session, we welcome papers that investigate peripheral conditions, drawing attention to the strangely familiar and the memorably unfamiliar; the events, encounters, forms, ideas, and narratives of the periphery. This session places equal weight on drawing and writing. Consequently we invite papers that use critical interpretive methods in dialogue with inventive modes of representation to closely read the contemporary urban periphery.

Please submit abstract proposals with a maximum of 2 images/drawings.