Add Peripheral Centralities: The Lost and Past Urbanity of the Suburbs

The term ‘peripheral centralities’ may seem something of an oxymoron and yet the spatial peripheries of cities have often been more central to urban development processes than is appreciated. To better understand the nature of peripheral centrality, Peripheral Centralities: The Lost and Past Urbanity of the Suburbs brings together a wide variety of examples of lost and forgotten peripheral centralities of different sizes, purpose, geographical location, and political complexion, dating from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present day. Following the introduction, two chapters provide broad overviews of peripheral centralities in international and national systems of centralities. The next four chapters look at plans from settings as different as Dublin as Shanghai that, for one reason or another, failed to materialize. The following eight chapters each describes cases where projects have been realized, ranging from peripheral townships in England to a Chinese steel city. To conclude the book, the editors highlight the themes revealed in the foregoing chapters and consider the part an appreciation of peripheral centralities might play in the development of urban theory from the outside in.

Nicholas A. Phelps is Professor and Chair of Urban Planning and Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

Roger Keil is Distinguished Research Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto and Fellow of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIFAR) Humanity’s Urban Future program.

Paul J. Maginn is Director of the Public Policy Institute and an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Western Australia, Perth.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Peripheral Centralities – Lost and Past Nicholas A. Phelps, Roger Keil and Paul Maginn

1. Centres in the Metropolitan Periphery: A Spatial Planning History 
   Robert Freestone
    
2. Soviet Sputnik Towns: The Past of a Sustainable Urban Future? Remaking Periphery through Distributing Centrality
   Oleg Golubchikov and Irina Ilina
    
3. Pipedream or Growth Area Benchmark? Berwick’s Metrotown Plan
   Victoria Kolankiewicz, David Nichols and Nicholas A. Phelps
    
4. Flying Boats, Garden Suburbs, Oil Refineries and Motorways – Exploring the Forgotten Twentieth-Century Plans for Dublin Bay
   Ruth McManus
    
5. ‘Metropolitan Adelaide’s Unique Opportunity’: Charles Reade’s Plan of Adeladie and Suburbs (1917)
   Christine Garnaut
    
6. Informal Centralities against Fascism: Popular Urbanization in Madrid, 1940s–1970s
   Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago and Noel A. Manzano Gómez
    
7. The Greater Shanghai Plan (1927–1937): An Unfulfilled Urban Dream
   Richard Hu
    
8. War, Military Settlements, and Planetary (Sub)Urbanization
   Gabriel Schwake and Carola Hein
    
9. Exploring the Emergence of Peripheral Centralities in Bengaluru: The Case of Electronics City
   H.S. Sudhira
    
10. What Peripheral Centrality Does to the City: The ‘EUR neighbourhood’ in Rome, Italy
    Marco Cremaschi
     
11. ‘A Bright New World of Convenience, Efficiency, and Plenty’: The Incorporation and Dissolution of Peripheral Mass Public Housing in Newcastle and Dundee, 1960s to 1990s
    Andrew Hoolachan and Mark Tewdwr-Jones
     
12. The Social Ambitions and Failures of Architecture in Oslo’s New Towns of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
    Per Gunnar Røe
     
13. Wuhan’s Red Steel City: The Waning Centrality of an Industrial Satellite Town?
    Julie T. Miao, Nicholas A. Phelps, Sainan Lin, and Zhigang Li
     
14. Lost and Peripheral Centralities in the Post-Colony Lessons from West Africa
    Laurent Fourchard
     
15. Conclusion: Histories beyond ‘Methodological Cityism’
    Keil, Paul Maginn and Nicholas Phelps