In this guest post Dr Andrew Tucker discusses Intersections on the Periphery: the Good City in a Time of Crisis, a seminar series exploring how rapid peripheral urbanisation, intensifying climate impacts, and deepening inequalities intersect, and what this means for working towards ‘the good city’. The project was supported by an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award.
What makes the good city, and how is it shaped by growing peripheral urbanisation, intensifying climate impacts, and deepening inequalities?
These were the grounding questions of the project Intersections on the Periphery: the Good City in a Time of Crisis, funded through the Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Awards (2023–2024). The seminar series was curated by Andrew Tucker (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town), Neha Sami and Shriya Anand (Indian Institute for Human Settlements), and Colin McFarlane (Durham University).
Held across two workshops, the series brought together established and emerging scholars from diverse geographical contexts to grapple with how urbanisation manifests at the peripheries of cities, and the central role these spaces play in contemporary urban growth. Initiated from the premise that we need new ways of thinking about peripheral urbanisation and its intersections with everyday urban realities, particularly in conditions of climate crisis and socio-spatial inequality, the project created a platform for open-ended conversation, allowing participants to reflect on how to make sense of this intersection and what working towards the good city might entail under conditions of crisis.
The first hybrid workshop was hosted by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) from 27–28 November 2023, focusing on different ways of knowing and understanding the urban periphery. ACC researchers Liza Rose Cirolia, Gareth Haysom, and Mercy Brown-Luthango set the scene for the discussions, drawing on their cross-cutting work on urbanisation at the intersection of sustainable infrastructure, urban food systems, and social justice. Their contributions unpacked the role of planning and regulation, examined the relationship between infrastructure and peripheral urbanisation, and offered early reflections on the idea of the good city.
The second workshop was hosted by IIHS at its Bangalore City Campus from 13–14 January 2024, building directly on the conceptual work initiated in Cape Town and deepening engagements with climate change, inequality, and peripheralisation. The workshops interrogated the conceptual, methodological and political dimensions of urban peripheries, and the wider nature and potential of the periphery as an idea in critical urban research.
Across both workshops, participants presented an array of draft papers that delved into the diverse ways that inequalities are (re)produced at different typologies of urban margins. Topics ranged from analyses of ageing inequalities, feminist, gendered, and queer perspectives on urban inclusivity, to examinations of how industrial corridors, warehousing, and landfills reshape peripheral spaces. They also shared advanced propositions for addressing these inequalities. Drawing on their respective research conducted over many years in cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Bangalore, Delhi, Manila, Chennai, Copenhagen, and Bristol, the discussions generated rich and generative scholarly exchanges.
A few examples illustrate the diversity and generative nature of the discussion. Focusing on the floodplains of the Yamuna Khadar in Delhi, Rajat Kumar explored urban agriculture as a form of peripheral urbanisation, highlighting the limited research on migrant communities engaged in agrarian activities within the city. He illustrated how these communities persist in precarious conditions, under constant threat of marginalisation and eviction. Kumar argued that the good city can be advanced if “urban discourses can strive for inclusive and just urban ecologies, which support diverse livelihoods and multiple senses of belonging.”
In her paper on peripheral urbanisation and inequality in Johannesburg, Federica Duca drew on more than a decade of research on urban wealth. She proposed the idea of the “good city as commons” and challenged the state’s framing of planned smart cities and gated golf estates as inclusive interventions. “Because of their economic value, governance hierarchies, and visions of the city,” Duca wrote, “they foster inequality and do not contribute to the good city as commons.”
Ihnji John examined peripheral urbanisation in Copenhagen and Bristol – two “green capitals” internationally recognised for their commitments to sustainable urbanism and environmental improvement. Her work highlighted how even in what might be framed as “good cities,” peripheral urbanisation reveals tensions between housing provision, environmental conservation, and spatial justice. Sustainable urban futures, she argued, are shaped less by harmony than by contested negotiations among competing values.
One of the key outputs of the seminar series was a book of abstracts, published on the ACC website. Conceived as primarily a public resource, the book brings these emergent research agendas into conversation and makes them accessible to researchers, students, and practitioners working on cities grappling with multiple, intersecting crises. It also ensures that the work of early-career scholars, in particular, finds sustained visibility beyond the workshops themselves. The conversations initiated through the seminar continue to inform ongoing research, teaching, and collaboration among participants. In addition, the seminar organisers – Anand, Sami, Tucker and McFarlane – are developing a reflective piece on how we might think about and research peripheries in urban studies today.
This project was an incredible opportunity to work collectively with scholars—both early career and more established, and from across sites in the Global North and Global South—to consider new vocabularies for conceptualising divergent experiences of urban marginalisation.