Beyond the Edge: Australia's First National Peri-urban Conference La Trobe University Oct 2013

1. Beneath the messy
agri-scapes: spaces
in between
Angela Castles
Institute of Regional Development
University of Tasmania
akc@utas.edu.au

2. Complex messy
landscapes
• planning has a very narrow interpretation of
the peri-urban’s use
• prevailing view: a space with no firm identity
and an inevitable transition to residential
land use
• planning is allowing these spaces to be lost,
and this seemed to be at odds with what can
be seen
• an identity crisis taking place – messy and
confused spaces

3. Research imperatives
• does the peri-urban
have an identity,
and if so, what does
it look like?
• if it does, then how
can it subsequently
be expressed in
planning terms?

4. Making sense of messiness
• contextual forces: population
growth, agriculture and food
security and sustainable
landscapes (amenity, ecosystem
services and open space)
• the multidisciplinary nature of the
challenges - different types of
knowledge required to respond to
the research questions
• led to a view of the peri-urban as
wicked and much of its
wickedness lies in its complexity

5. Unpacking complexity using landscape
• ten versions of the same scene
(Meinig 1979)
• planners view the landscape
too superficially (Armstrong
2006)
• rural landscapes are complex and we must
accept this complexity rather than seeking to
cure it – place it in its context and find an
accommodation of the forces at play (Barr 2003)
• the peri-urban landscape as a distinct landscape

6. Unpacking complexity using voice
• voice as a tool to unpack the complexity, to tear
apart the peri-urban and find new
accommodations
• allows us to capture meaning and values
• creates a space for people to talk about the
landscape and the place and their relationship to it
• allowed a search for deeper meaning underneath
the messiness to understand what causes and
creates it
• a cacophony of voices emerged

7. Voices in the peri-urban
• four main voices
• the developer (loud)
• the dense voice (loud when
challenged)
• the media voice (persistent
background)
• the producer voice (quieter
than expected)
• different voices of different
strengths
• expected dominant productive
voice was not as evident

8. Voice highlighted...
• the failings of policy makers
• the state of life on the fringe is not as some
would have us believe
• many people do not feel they get what they
pay for when they relocate
• the very thing that attract people into the
space is often temporary
• the same voice that seeks to escape the
suburbs often seeks to recreate it

9. • a drive for change and Hints of emergent
disconnection from
positivity
status quo
• some pursuing an
alternate identity for
the space
• a challenge to the
Reconfiguring assets
relevance of the urban
and resources
rural dichotomy
• hints of identity – a
third space where
producer voice
reinvigorated

10. • its usefulness has been
badly misinterpreted
• it is a useful space,
especially when
An alternate
contextualised with
identity: the
challenges of food security,
peri-urban as
sustainability and growth
the new useful
• multiple expressions of
value and an ongoing
challenge to value its
inherent assets

11. • a novel value chain
The new useful
• an opportunity space
to reconfigure
resources into new
enterprises
• a site of emerging
collaboration
• a place where relationships are critical
• old has conflated with new to create an
alternate identity – a new market

12. Conclusion
• the peri-urban does have an identity
• it can hold competing realities steady, in a way
that other pieces of land have not been able to do
• the emerging peri-urban activity brings its assets
together to create new value and use
• captured in the idea of a new market space where
individuals entwine its multifunctional assets
together into a new business model
• this land can contain and hold what looks like a
messy agriscape, but when centred around
usefulness is much more
• quite possible that over time other platforms will
also emerge

13. Bibliography
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