Peripheral Perspectives: Broadening the View on Urban Nature [poster & exhibition session]

Abstract

This research presents an attempt to revisit the dichotomous relationship between the urban and the rural, the city and the countryside or the space of production and the space of consumption. Major political and urban transformations of the last decade of the 20th century, along with various global crises, from climate to economic and housing, which are currently present, somehow improved the marginalized state of the countryside. Since then, we can identify a growing number of people migrating from urban to rural areas and therefore, a growing number of architects, urbanists, planners, geographers, theorists, philosophers, and others that are dealing with the concept of redefining the countryside. What can we learn about a particular urban environment from its natural and rural surroundings? This research aims to challenge the common understanding of the urban environment, by proposing a new displaced view, a strategy of understanding the built environment through its peripheral nature and its surrounding rural sprawl. Furthermore, this research aims to emphasize and promote the impact of nature and natural surroundings on the urban environment. Instead of focusing on the built urban environment in order to understand the contemporary condition of built space, this research argues that defocusing the built and researching the perimeter instead can provide for substantial new knowledge about the urban context. Through acknowledging nature and the unbuilt, we tend to produce new knowledge about our built environments. By employing the NSA (Narrative Spatial Analytics) method, which integrates 3 research by design techniques - narrative drawing, analytical mapping and architectural montage, this research aims to investigate widely differing natural layers of the given territory, and thus offer a holistic view of the urban environment.