Chapter 5

Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics

for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities
in the Peri-Urban Interface

David Simon and Andrew Adam-Bradford

Abstract Understanding of urban fringes or peri-urban interfaces (PUIs) as zones

characterised by rapid transitional change and sprawling urbanisation has increased
markedly over recent years. Archaeological evidence also illustrates the pivotal role
that peri-urban zones once played in the survivability of ancient urban centres. Over
the last three decades, urban growth and associated transitional changes have accel-
erated in most regions, producing major challenges to the development of resilient
cities capable of absorbing climatic, economic and environmental shocks. Globalised
processes of industrialisation and market interdependence have remoulded urban
fringes, bringing increased environmental impacts, including the loss of natural
resources and environmental buffers now recognised as essential for urban resil-
ience. Furthermore, ongoing global environmental change (GEC) and increasing
socio-economic inequality are generating new priorities as peri-urban zones con-
solidate, erode and shift outwards. Given the inadequacies of existing frameworks,
we advocate a hybrid approach to PUI planning and design that draws on integrated,
agropolitan-type perspectives embedded within a resilient, locally appropriate
regional-urban focus within broader socio-spatial and geo-economic systems.
Diverse historical and contemporary examples inform the discussion of the PUI
planning and design and the identification of policy recommendations for a hybrid
planning approach based on adaptive capacity and resilience.

Keywords Hybrid planning • Peri-urban interface • Urban fringe • Urban sustain-

ability • Urban resilience

D. Simon (*)
Mistra Urban Futures, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London,
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK
e-mail: [Link]@[Link]; [Link]@[Link]
A. Adam-Bradford (*)
Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University,
Ryton Gardens, Wolston Lane, CV8 3LG Coventry, Warwickshire, UK
e-mail: ab3805@[Link]

© The Author(s) 2016 57

B. Maheshwari et al. (eds.), Balanced Urban Development:
Options and Strategies for Liveable Cities, Water Science and Technology
Library 72, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-28112-4_5
58 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

5.1 Introduction

The growth of peri-urban areas around cities, particularly as urban growth outpaces infra-
structure development, is one of the most prominent current changes to urban structure. In
Asia, this is occurring on a dramatic scale: in Jakarta and Bangkok, some 77 % and 53 % of
urban growth by 2025, respectively, is expected to be in peri-urban regions, while in China,
some 40 % of urban growth by 2025 is expected to be in peri-urban areas as far as 150–
300 km from core cities. In Asian cities, lateral spread is occurring along transport corri-
dors, creating a form of ‘regional urbanisation’ … The growth of … as well as the
development of peri-urban areas – are occurring in Latin America and the Caribbean and in
the transitional countries. Peri-urban informal development is a key pattern in sub-Saharan
Africa, particularly on customary land (UN-HABITAT 2009: 153).

This chapter is not intended as a review of the vast and diverse literature on the
transitional zones on the periphery of larger urban areas known variously as the
urban-rural fringe, peri-urban area or interface (PUI), urban edge or periphery. That
task has been undertaken elsewhere (e.g. Mbiba and Huchzermeyer 2002; Simon
et al. 2004; McGregor et al. 2006; Simon 2008). Our objectives here are fourfold: to
draw a few key insights from the state of the art; to develop further the understand-
ing that, empirical diversity notwithstanding, such interface zones occur worldwide
across both space and time; to explore the implications of global environmental
change (GEC) for PUIs and those dependent upon them for their livelihoods; and to
propose a novel, hybrid approach to planning in PUIs appropriate to their character-
istic range of activities and dynamic changes in order to promote urban resilience.
The terminology used for these interface zones reflects different urban research
and planning paradigms, urban planning and management traditions in different
parts of the world, the duration and particular form of urbanisation, theoretical and
disciplinary differences, and analytical purpose. For instance, urban planners seek-
ing to delimit the spatial extent of a city or to determine appropriate urban politico-
administrative boundaries are interested in finding tangible ‘clean breaks’ in the
built-up area to distinguish what lies within the boundaries from that without. By
contrast, systems analysis, national infrastructural or logistical planning, and
research on mobility/migration and livelihoods tends to emphasise spheres of influ-
ence, functional relationships and movement spaces and associated flows, all of
which transcend such boundaries and emphasise continuities and connections
across physical, agro-ecological and politico-administrative entities. Simon (2008)
has examined these different traditions and emphases, showing that there are com-
mon threads around the world despite different combinations and the differing rela-
tive importance of various underlying factors and processes.
The traditional notion of a rural-urban dichotomy is now widely recognised to be
simplistic and that, for most purposes, a continuum is more appropriate and, indeed,
compatible with the highly diverse rural-urban gradients, rates of transition, combi-
nations of factors, and functional or land-use complexities encountered in different
regions. Many interfaces are not linear but have diverse and complex spatial forms,
including edge cities, urban archipelagos, desakota/extended metropolitan regions,
and the like. Furthermore, the rapid globalisation of economies, populations and
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 59

urban design and governance approaches through corporate endeavour, aid and
development programmes, planning/management education and training, and the
recent proliferation of city twinning, partnership and network arrangements have
substantially reduced some of these traditional differences.
It is now becoming increasingly necessary to transcend the traditional historico-
spatial analytical and ‘planning ghettos’ that, for instance, have largely restricted the
flourishing research and increasingly sophisticated understanding of PUI interac-
tions and their livelihood implications to the global South. Economic change, not
least the suddenness and depth of the credit crunch and consequent global recession
since 2008, together with ecological and environmental concerns for sustainability,
local resilience and self-reliance, and increasing vulnerability to the impacts of
GEC, strongly suggest that peri-urban dynamics, environmental sustainability, live-
lihoods and food security are becoming central concerns worldwide. Therefore,
many of the traditional concerns of peri-urban ‘development’ research and planning
in the global South can and should provide lessons for (post-) industrial cities in
countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
and the transitional economies struggling to adjust to rapidly changing circum-
stances in the context of rigid or outdated planning legacies on the urban fringe or
in the Zwischenstadt (e.g. Audirac 1999; Jones 2000; Bunker and Houston 2003;
Sieverts 2003; Busck et al. 2006; Gallent et al. 2006; McFarlane 2006; Qviström
2010, 2013; Ravetz et al. 2013). Most existing forms of urbanism are morphologi-
cally, functionally and environmentally unsustainable under current conditions.
They also face profound challenges in overcoming the obstacles to becoming more
resilient cities capable of absorbing climatic, economic, environmental and demo-
graphic shocks while also addressing structural inequities and injustices.
There has been renewed recent interest in urban history over the very long durée
(e.g. Taylor 2012), deriving at least partly from new archaeological work referred to
below and also from a desire to understand urban environmental legacies that might
be relevant to current sustainability and resilience concerns, including landmark
contributions by Douglas (2013) and Elmqvist et al. (2013a). In this context, it is
also noteworthy that such research has to date not generally identified historical
analogies with present-day issues at the urban fringe or through peri-urban inter-
faces or transition zones. That is the first objective of this chapter, as an aid then to
transcend the diversity of current institutional and planning settings and processes
in order to identify appropriate principles for addressing the dynamic challenges of
such zones to promote adaptive and transformative urban sustainability and
resilience.

5.2 Historical Perspectives on the PUI

As indicated in preliminary terms a few years ago (Simon 2008), recent archaeo-
logical advances, facilitated by new remote sensing and associated technologies,
reveal that ancient civilisations in various parts of the world had urban systems with
60 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

features consistent with characteristics of present-day PUIs. New evidence contin-

ues to emerge and, to date, such published findings relate to the Khmer complex
centred on Angkor in present-day Cambodia, Mayan sites in Meso-America and the
Upper Xingu region of the Amazon basin in Brazil (Evans et al. 2007; Heckenberger
et al. 2008; Mann 2008; Smith 2010, 2012; Fletcher 2012; Isendahl 2012; Barthel
and Isendahl 2013; Isendahl and Smith 2013) but there is every reason to anticipate
comparable evidence in future relating to complex ancient urban cultures of the
Middle East, South Asia (not least Pollonaruwa and Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka),
sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean rim and elsewhere. The greater
Angkor area covers some 3,000 km2, over one third of which was covered by an
urban complex of settlements integrated by an extensive hydraulic system (Fig.
5.1). Settlement densities varied within and beyond the boundaries of the known
complex, itself centred on several key temples and major reservoirs. The hydraulic
networks were quite possibly developed to ensure reliable food production in order
to support the increasing concentrations of people living in these growing conurba-
tions in the face of fluctuating rainfall and other environmental conditions (Evans
et al. 2007). Indeed, there are speculations in the literature that a failure of food
production, perhaps due to lack of maintenance or destruction of key hydraulic
facilities during conflicts or natural disasters, may have been implicated in the col-
lapse of these societies, along with the more commonly proffered explanations
relating to environmental changes, including in prevailing temperatures and
rainfall.
Similarly, recent evidence shows that pre-Hispanic Maya grew a significant pro-
portion of their food within an ‘agro-urban landscape’ at Xuch (Isendahl 2012:
1123) and elsewhere, which had distinct hallmarks of what we would today recog-
nise as peri-urban:
The general distributional pattern of architecture at Xuch follows the familiar low-density
settlement model and suggests that the settlement may have extended over as much as
20 km2… despite the civic-ceremonial core being only mid-sized in comparison to other
regional centres. At the centre of the agro-urban landscape is a large pre-Hispanic rainwater
reservoir, which played an important economic, political and symbolic role in the physical
transformation and social construction of landscape (Isendahl 2012: 1117).

In a synthetic paper drawing on their respective previous work, Isendahl and

Smith (2013) compare Mayan and Aztec urban forms and are the first archaeolo-
gists within this new literature to draw attention explicitly to the distinctive peri-
urban nature of many residential areas. Following Smith (2010), they also challenge
the ‘recentism’ of much current urban agriculture literature and argue that these
ancient urban forms were highly sustainable over several centuries; indeed Mayan
cities collapsed only when their socio-ecological system was reorganised. The
authors also specifically posit the importance of learning from such historical les-
sons for present day urban sustainability initiatives.
The pre-industrial and pre-colonial walled cities of West Africa provide further
evidence of integrated indigenous approaches to regional land management and ter-
ritorial development that supported pre-colonial urban cores through a highly
organised and co-ordinated peri-urban interface. The walled cities of Hausaland and
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 61

Fig. 5.1 Approximate extent of temple-and-pond-based agricultural settlements of the Angkorian

and pre-Angkorian periods on the basis of an analysis of Landsat imagery and the spatial coverage
of recent archaeological maps (Source: modified after Evans et al. 2007, Fig. 5.3)

Yorubaland provided the urban inhabitants with a degree of physical defence, par-
ticularly as these areas had high populations so that competition for resources and
control of trade often resulted in regional conflict. Moreover, labour-intensive urban
infrastructures such as city walls necessitated organised communal labour, which in
turn was dependent on a meticulously planned and integrated peri-urban interface
for food and subsistence. For example, in the Benin City area, much of the extraor-
dinary network of interlocking earthworks allowed demarcation of sufficient land to
ensure that each enclosed settlement had land for cultivation and extended fallow,
while surrounding ‘wild forest’ resources were also planned and allocated to differ-
ent settlements within the urban core (Connah 2000).
62 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

The import of this still localised but mounting evidence from different (sub-)
tropical regions is threefold: first, it is enhancing our understanding of agro-
environmental underpinnings and sustainability of historical urbanisms across
space, time and cultural domains. Secondly, it is highlighting that features like a
PUI, which have been associated particularly with present-day urbanism driven by
mechanised transport and industrial globalisation, have been features of complex
and sometimes large-scale urbanism since ancient times in diverse political ecolo-
gies, cultural realms, social formations and technological systems. Thirdly, these
ancient peri-urban areas may provide valuable lessons for current efforts to develop
sustainable, resilient cities with greater security of food supply and livelihoods. In a
sense, they represented early examples of how a ‘basic-needs strategy’ sustained
urban populations though a forerunner of a generic ‘agropolitan’ approach, to bor-
row a term first utilised in the mid-1970s by John Friedmann and Mike Douglass to
describe their anti-growth-pole vision of rural urbanisation, and to which we return
below.

5.3 The PUI: A Contemporary Perspective

In North America, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, PUIs are characterised by
distinctive urban-rural boundaries with clearly demarcated planning zones that
illustrate the conventional urban and rural planning divide (e.g. Audirac 1999;
Jones 2000; Bunker and Houston 2003; Busck et al. 2006; McFarlane 2006). In
these regions, early urban environmental challenges were met through reactive
urban planning strategies that consolidated a superficial urban-rural dichotomy and
gave rise to rigid urban planning doctrines based on homogeneous land use zones
and were later to be exported through colonial influence and associated bodies of
practice such as town and country planning. In the United States of America (USA),
far more attention is still devoted to the quintessential post-World War II urban
phenomena of suburbanisation and sprawl than peri-urbanisation (Teaford 2006).
Hoggart (2005: 5) highlights that in the United Kingdom (UK), ‘the land-use plan-
ning system keeps vigorous checks on the incursion of ‘urban land-uses’ into ‘the
countryside”. By contrast, in France, Germany and Spain, Hoggart discerns ele-
ments of consistency in socio-cultural and landscape changes near urban fringes, as
well as in districts that are more distant from the city, but a town and country plan-
ning divide has remained, although there are now examples of more nuanced
approaches, and Hoggart calls for new methods to address complexity based on a
‘hierarchy of (often urban-centred) ‘functional regions” (Hoggart 2005: 6). His is a
somewhat different perspective from that of the literal in-betweenness of the
Zwischenstadt phenomenon and process identified and problematised by Sieverts
(2003). Changing demographic structures and economic conditions affect the rela-
tive pressures to redevelop urban brownfield sites versus greenfield expansion on
urban fringes (Simon 2008), but also highlight the importance of restoring ‘work-
ing greenspaces’ (especially for urban agriculture and woodland management)
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 63

within mature, slow-growing or stable cities in Japan and other post-industrial

countries as contributions to enhanced urban sustainability (Yokohari and Bolthouse
2011). Qviström (2010, 2013) identifies a legacy of incomplete peri-urban inter-
ventions in Western countries (his term) by numerous sectoral and spatial planning
agencies, including local authorities, that create a ‘crowded policy space’ where
discursive selectivity obscures other storylines that may be vital for the promotion
of landscape integrity, sustainability and resilience. He demonstrates this with a
detailed case study of a small Swedish town, whereas Busck et al. (2006) reveal
considerable land conversion from agriculture to urban uses in peri-urban
Copenhagen over the 1984–2004 period. This also demonstrates a far more dynamic
PUI than much of the European literature implies. Modest change towards charac-
teristically mixed peri-urban land-use is evident in various other places, including
Vancouver (Fig. 5.2).
Interestingly, a tangible trend is now emerging in Europe for urban fringe
research to be framed explicitly in peri-urban terms (e.g. Busck et al. 2006; Rosol
and Schweizer 2012; Cabannes and Raposo 2013; Qviström 2013, Ravetz et al.
2013). This might herald a welcome move towards more compatible analytical
perspectives worldwide, since they emphasise the dynamics of European PUIs
rather than the essentially static picture painted by most previous authors with very
few notable exceptions like Sieverts (2003). Of particular note in this context is that

Fig. 5.2 Typical mix of smallholder agriculture and new upper middle class housing in Vancouver’s
southern peri-urban interface (© David Simon)
64 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

Cabannes and Raposo (2013) address urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in a
manner hitherto associated largely with the global South, examining the extent to
which such practices in allotment gardens and other spaces in Lisbon and London
assist in integrating migrants socially and in biodiversity enhancement. Their find-
ings again point to the importance of local contextual specificities, with cohesion
maintenance within particular migrant communities outweighing integration with
the host population. Interestingly, their paper, and that by Rosol and Schweizer
(2012) examining an experimental organic peri-urban co-operative farm as a model
of solidarity economics, form part of a collection explicitly examining the extent to
which UPA everywhere forms part of a global movement (Atkinson 2013).
In much of the global South, PUIs are characterised by dynamic transformations
and rapid urbanisation, largely as a consequence of global processes of colonisa-
tion, industrialisation, independence, and a rapidly expanding and globalising mar-
ket economy which continues to reshape and remould the urban fringe. In India, for
example, development and environmental issues impacting along the urban-rural
interface predate independence in 1947 and were already firmly on the policy
agenda as Gandhi himself researched, practised and advocated cottage industries
and rural self-sufficiency in an attempt to stem rural-urban migration and reduce the
growth of urban slums that were commonly located in the PUI. After independence,
urbanisation accelerated, producing even greater social and environmental impacts.
In some early peri-urban research, Saini (1989) highlighted the development and
environmental issues in metropolitan Delhi’s urban-rural interface and stressed the
importance of ‘peripheral community development’ as urban sprawl consumed vast
tracts of arable land and natural resources.
Such work has now been followed by considerable output from multiple peri-
urban sites in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, reaching similar conclusions, although
the rates of peri-urban landscape change are generally greater and environmental
contamination is higher, while slum expansion is now almost ubiquitious. While
research conclusions may highlight that the fundamental issues remain the same,
the rate and intensity of peri-urban change have gained considerable pace, bringing
irreversible environmental changes to the PUI (McGregor, et al. 2006; Simon 2008;
see also Fig. 5.3). Such rapid change has resulted in considerable loss of biodiver-
sity and natural resource buffers that once provided important sources of subsis-
tence, fibre and fuel to urban populations, while also providing even greater
ecological systems services in relation to regional ecology and local climatic condi-
tions. With the loss of such important ecological functions and protection, urban
areas and particularly their PUIs are more vulnerable to natural hazards such as
heavy rainstorms, flash flooding and landslides and also to less frequent but equally
devastating tsunamis and earthquakes (Elmqvist et al. 2013b).
Much of this vulnerability stems from the expansion of urban areas into marginal
lands such as the many urban settlements found on steep slopes or onto flood plains.
In both cases, changing land uses and the associated removal of vegetation and
increase in areas covered by impermeable construction materials have profound
impacts on the local ecology, such as reducing rainwater infiltration, destabilising
soils and slopes, and increasing urban runoff. In the context of disaster risk reduc-
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 65

Fig. 5.3 Rapid urbanisation of Kumasi’s PUI in Ghana (© David Simon)

tion, these very same PUI areas that are characterised by complex and dynamic
mixes of socio-economic inequality and social and physical vulnerability are also
subject to diverse planning omissions and ambiguities. This situation arose because
these intermediate locations often straddle urban and rural administrative boundar-
ies and are thus neglected by both urban and rural planning and governance institu-
tions and political processes because PUIs rarely have specific, appropriate
institutions or contain politically powerful interests (McGregor et al. 2006).

5.3.1 Global Environmental Change and the PUI

The bidirectional relationships between urbanisation and global environmental

change (GEC) are now attracting increasing research efforts in recognition of the
fact that urban areas generate up to 75 % of a country’s greenhouse gas emissions
and other contributions to GEC. Moreover, since humankind is now predominantly
an urban-dwelling species, it is in urban areas that many of the impacts of GEC will
be most widely felt (e.g. Sánchez-Rodríguez et al. 2005; Leichenko and Solecki
2006; Parnell et al. 2007; Simon 2007, 2010; Rosenzweig et al. 2011; Simon and
Leck 2015a, b). Although the importance of the PUI to urban livelihoods, resource
utilisation, leisure activities and ecosystem services has been recognised
66 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

(Sánchez-Rodríguez et al. 2005), very little attention has yet been devoted to empir-
ical research on GEC implications for such zones (see Olwig and Gough 2013;
Lwasa et al. 2014, 2015).
As explained above, PUIs are undergoing rapid change as cities expand and new
areas on or beyond the urban periphery are drawn increasingly into their spheres of
activity and influence. Yesterday’s adjacent rural area is today’s PUI and tomorrow’s
outer suburb. It is important to ascertain just how the processes of land-use conver-
sion from rural to urban uses and of livelihood changes contribute to GEC and, in
turn, render PUIs increasingly vulnerable to its impacts. Given the rapidity of such
changes, it is very likely that PUIs represent a focal point for environmental changes
contributing to GEC and, in turn, areas where many residents are poor and vulnerable
to the impacts of GEC. Loss of farmland and hence food supply, conversion of natu-
ral land cover to tarmac and concrete, increasingly intense run-off of surface water
after rain, increasing abstraction of groundwater, extraction of resources for con-
struction, infrastructure and other industries are among the more important changes.
Conversely, sea level rise, saltwater intrusion into fresh water aquifers, increas-
ing mean temperatures, damage to housing, commercial and industrial premises and
infrastructure are specific risks, most of which are felt particularly acutely in PUIs
as a result of the loss of natural barriers that provide protection and underpin resil-
ience. Importantly, the impacts of GEC are already being felt, a trend that will
increase in intensity. GEC comprises two distinct but overlapping elements: the
increasing intensity and probably also frequency of extreme events, with shorter
recovery periods between them, and slow-onset but (semi-)permanent changes, e.g.
rising sea levels and changing atmospheric conditions. These intersect in ways that
have profound importance for urban areas in both coastal zones and in drought-
prone inland areas. There is already sufficient evidence to demonstrate that GEC
can no longer be dismissed as being only a long-term phenomenon that will merely
become a problem for future generations; some changes are already occurring (e.g.
Fall et al. 2005; Adger et al. 2009; Bicknell et al. 2009; Simon 2010, 2014;
Rosenzweig et al. 2011; Simon and Leck 2015a, b).
Mitigation can often be achieved relatively quickly through simple restrictions
and incentives to accelerate behavioural changes to reduce the impact of current
activities and reduce vulnerability to GEC impacts. Adaptation is generally longer
term and involves strategic decisions and political will. However, there is no neces-
sary tension between these sets of response; indeed, well targeted measures can
contain elements of both mitigation and adaptation simultaneously. Conventional
urban planning is rigid and restrictive in nature, unsuited to the rapidity of changing
conditions or the flexible and facilitatory orientation required in changing times.
Conversely, ‘spontaneous’ or informal ‘popular’ planning by low-income communi-
ties in shantytowns will also not be able to cope with the magnitude of changes and
levels of resourcing required. Coping with GEC impacts and ‘climate proofing’ cit-
ies therefore require innovative, hybrid, flexible and adaptive approaches that are
appropriate to the dynamic nature of PUIs. As elaborated below, these should
embody some of the appropriate principles underlying the sustainability of ancient
agro-urban systems examined above.
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 67

5.4 Hybrid Planning and Design for the PUI

5.4.1 From Integration to Hybridity

A common priority in order to address environmental issues on urban fringes world-

wide is the facilitation of future strategic/integrated urban planning across the
numerous local authority boundaries (including different categories of local author-
ity) (Simon 2008; Rosenzweig et al. 2011). The indigenous urban planning and
agricultural design strategies found in the pre-colonial Aztec and Mayan cities of
Meso-America, the Angkor complex in present-day Cambodia and walled cities of
Hausaland and Yorubaland in present-day Nigeria illustrate the benefits of an inte-
grated and strategic approach at the urban-regional level. In such a context, planning
addressed the allocation of resources along the urban-rural continuum, while design
was practised through traditional wisdom – comprising an amalgam of indigenous
knowledge, religious values and/or customary practice – which provided the tech-
niques used for allocating natural resources in accordance with local land tenure
systems. Crucially too, many of these systems were underpinned by an acute appre-
ciation of the importance of water and local hydrological cycles. Elaborate and
integrated agro-hydrological systems were developed across the urban and peri-
urban zones to store, distribute and safeguard water and to maximise its harvesting
and conservation.
In indigenous Nigerian cities, forms of intensive food production such as stall-
fed livestock were maintained within the walls, thus providing some security if the
city was under siege. Manures were then used outside the walls on intensively main-
tained vegetable plots. Further away from the city, staple crops would be grown with
rainfed dryland agricultural techniques; access to dryland forestry was also avail-
able in these locations. Good crop storage facilities within the city enabled the resi-
dents to keep food stocks for both human and livestock feed during conflicts and
sieges (Connah 2000). Through this system, natural forests were conserved, agricul-
tural land managed with a rotational fallow verging on precision, and even urban
organic waste was recycled, thus closing an important peri-urban nutrient recycling
loop (Connah 2000). In such a context, planning and design were delivered as an
integrated approach and at a strategic level – the urban-rural continuum or the
urban-regional area. While it would be impossible and naively nostalgic to attempt
to recreate such conditions today, the importance of applying an integrated approach
to the urban-rural continuum is paramount, particularly in the light of the rapid
changes now being experienced in these transitional zones.
By contrast, today’s densely populated and dynamic PUIs in fast-growing urban
contexts are usually poorly integrated into their urban systems. They straddle differ-
ent governance systems as explained above, and experience instability and often
uncontrolled resource extraction and waste dumping. Water resources are neglected
and often heavily contaminated, with food production in steep decline. Changing
this equation – and the underlying short-termist view of local landowners, residents
and governance institutions – towards longer-term, more integrated and sustainable
68 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

approaches will be complex and challenging but essential for the PUIs and their
urban cores. Under such conditions the planning response required is not just inte-
grated but rather a hybrid approach that allows urban planners and municipal
authorities to draw on a range of urban and rural land planning and risk reduction
methodologies and tools to address specific issues at the urban-regional level but
within a global context. Such a planning approach will inevitably move resources
from the current national planning focus back to a regional level but should have
due regard to global economic markets and environmental processes. In essence,
this decentralisation of the planning processes, or ‘devolution of power’, is aimed at
increasing the flexible and facilitatory orientation of planning (and design) at the
urban-regional level in a similar manner to that previously proposed in the early
conceptions of agropolitan development.

5.4.2 Agropolitan-Type Approaches

A nostalgic return to pre-colonial or pre-industrial urban conditions, when agricul-

ture still frequently featured as an important urban activity, is neither feasible nor
desirable. But we do argue that revisiting such models is relevant and appropriate
for contemporary urban and peri-urban planning and design, especially in view of
current urban sustainability imperatives. In cities subject to political, economic and
ecological conditions such as increasing oil prices, erratic seasonal rains in sur-
rounding rural areas, war and conflict, coupled with limited urban sanitation, water
shortages and food insecurity, the emphasis on city-regional planning is likely to
re-emerge as a strategy to reconnect cities with the natural resources obtained from,
and ecosystem services (however valorised or quantified) provided by, peri-urban
areas. However, this will need to happen in a manner that maximises the effective
and efficient use of natural resources while minimising resource depletion such as
tree, vegetation, soil, water and nutrient losses.
Such regional planning strategies – an agropolitan approach – were first articu-
lated by Friedmann and Douglass in a UN Centre for Regional Development sym-
posium in 1975 as a critique of the inequalities being generated by traditional
growth pole strategies. Friedmann (2002: 138–9) describes it as a counter-model of
rural development:
Favoring rural townships, the model could as easily have been dubbed “the urbanisation of
the countryside.” Given prevailing densities in many parts of Asia, which were generally
higher than suburban densities in the USA, agropolitan development seemed to us to have
reasonable prospects in the densely populated regions of South and East Asia. The problem
was twofold: how to bring urban infrastructure, services, and nonfarm jobs to rural areas
and how to give local people a more effective voice in the use public funds for local
development.

The ideas were disseminated more widely in Friedmann and Weaver’s seminal
text, Territory and Function, in which they advocated ‘a basic-needs strategy for
territorial development’ (1979: 193), labelled an agropolitan approach to develop-
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 69

ment. This they defined broadly as a ‘self-generated process of dynamic change

from within agricultural communities to the larger processes of central guidance by
the state’, with the strategy involving substantial devolution of power to small ter-
ritorial units within the overall system of societal guidance (Friedmann 1985: 155).
Friedmann and Weaver (1979: 206) highlighted the importance of sound ‘political
leadership’ for such approaches, remarking that ‘agropolitan development is thus
more likely to evolve in response to particular historical opportunities than as a
result of technocratic planning’. This was the case in Cuba during the 1990s, where
reactive planning policies were introduced to address sustainable agriculture and
food security in an era of oil scarcity (Wright, 2009). Without such political leader-
ship, success was likely to be limited: ‘The political choice, then, would seem to be
between planning for equality and political self-determination at the lowest levels of
territorial governance or planning for inequality and political autocracy’ (Friedmann
1985: 155).
Although conceived in the context of spatial and politico-economic inequalities
characterising urbanisation in the global South, its tenets have global relevance. In
a generic context, if planning for equality and political self-determination has
remained elusive, then more nuanced or alternative strategies with specific compo-
nents addressing inequality are required, and such approaches can be found in disas-
ter risk reduction and integrated watershed management strategies, both of which
provide the planner with hybrid options that are highly relevant to the PUI, but most
importantly involve a substantial devolution of power to smaller territorial units
such as an urban region or a watershed. These are also very relevant to the imple-
mentation of mitigation and adaptation in the context of global environmental or
climate change, not least the biophysical parameters of adaptive capacity for exist-
ing socio-ecological systems.

5.4.3 Disaster Risk Reduction and Integrated Watershed

Management

Two distinct but nevertheless related planning approaches gaining increasing atten-
tion in academic, policy and practitioner circles are disaster risk reduction (DRR)
and integrated watershed management (IWM). DRR uses planning and policy tools
to address issues of vulnerability and build capacity and resilience to natural haz-
ards and anthropogenic disasters (Pelling and Wisner 2009). Vulnerability has been
defined as the lack of capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the
impact of a hazard (Wisner et al. 2004; Pelling and Wisner 2009). IWM, which has
a longer tradition, has been practised in various guises such as ‘comprehensive river
basin planning’, which dates back to the 1930s and its pioneering model, the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). This early planning approach sought to tackle
the industrial and urban expansion challenges of the period through watershed link-
ages and the integrated management of water and land resources (Friedmann and
Weaver 1979).
70 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

IWM has undergone several transformations, and although DRR is a more recent
concept, it too has been moulded to suit specific local conditions at different scales.
These evolutionary changes in both fields have sought to develop ‘self-generated
processes of dynamic change’ by a ‘substantial devolution of power to smaller ter-
ritorial units’ within an overall system, thus we now see the emergence of
community-based disaster risk reduction (Twig 2004) and participatory watershed
management (McGregor et al. 2006; Gregersen et al. 2007), both of which can be
suitably characterised by using elements of Friedmann and Weaver’s (1979)
approach. However, the related connection between the two planning approaches is
effected through the medium of water: as Gregersen et al. (2007: 2) highlight, ‘water
flows downstream, ignoring all political boundaries en route’ and ‘most of the things
that people do to their land and water upstream affects the water quantity, timing of
flow and quality downstream and, as a consequence, downstream land productivity
in its various forms.’
This applies equally in the context of disaster risk reduction as land use changes
in the watershed can have profound implications for vulnerability as experienced by
others (rural, urban and peri-urban) located downstream. This has clear ramifica-
tions in the context of rapid peri-urban change, particularly where marginalised
lands are settled, and compounds vulnerability issues stemming from agricultural
productivity in surrounding rural areas as well as urban water scarcity and food
insecurity. In such scenarios, the watershed approach could be a crucial planning
and policy tool for effective and efficient management of natural resources, particu-
larly in regard to reducing disaster risk and maintaining future food security in
expanding populous urban cores, where high quality agricultural land is often a
primary focus of conversion to other, more urban land uses. The watershed approach
is equally important in the tackling of ‘wildland’ fires in the PUI, as water resources
can form effective physical barriers for mitigation and fire breaks, and natural water
storage features become water reservoirs for fire fighting operations. Wildfires regu-
larly cause extensive devastation, affecting both poor and rich, in the USA, Australia,
Europe (including Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece); and South Africa
(Goldammer 2005; Ye 2005). The vulnerability stemming from problems associated
with wildland fires is particularly acute when the PUI is characterised by extensive
forestry and tree-based systems as opposed to lands predominantly used for agricul-
tural purposes. The demand for, and high value profits from, suburban development
set in woodland areas exacerbates these issues which is one reason that wildfires
often occur on the fringes of Australian, European and North American cities
(Goldammer 2005; Ye 2005), although such risks and vulnerabilities are not unique
to high-income countries; for example, wildfires have also devastated many peri-
urban areas in Indonesia (Tacconi et al. 2007).

5.4.4 Urban and Peri-urban Natural Resource Management

The ecosystems services approach is another analytical tool suited to urban and
peri-urban natural resource management. Four categories of ecosystem services are
commonly used: provisioning services (e.g., food/water/minerals/pharmaceuticals/
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 71

energy); regulating services (e.g., carbon sequestration/waste decomposition and

detoxification/purification of water and air/crop pollination/pest and disease con-
trol); habitat services (e.g., nutrient dispersal and cycling/seed dispersal/primary
production) and cultural services (e.g., cultural, intellectual and spiritual inspira-
tion/recreational experiences/ecotourism/scientific discovery) (ten Brink 2011;
Elmqvist et al. 2013b). Planning and designing at a wider urban ecosystem scale
have the potential to bring ‘macro’ scale benefits, including improved urban sanita-
tion; disaster risk reduction through better urban flood management and slope stabi-
lisation of steep hillsides; protection and rehabilitation of fragile and vulnerable
habitats, including riverbanks and wetlands which act as natural sponges and wild-
life havens; and reductions in the urban heat island effect.
The ecosystem services approach is used to detail the multiple benefits of appro-
priate urban and peri-urban natural resource management and conservation, includ-
ing in part what is now increasingly known as ‘greening the city’, thus clearly
linking urban ecosystem services to climate change mitigation and adaptation as
well as promoting urban-regional resilience. Examples from urban case studies
already experiencing high climatic variability (Fall et al. 2005; Bicknell et al. 2009;
Pelling and Wisner 2009; Simon 2010, 2014; Gotz and Schäffler 2015; Leck and
Roberts 2015) illustrate future scenarios and the importance of adopting appropriate
urban and peri-urban environmental policies now to foster climate change adapta-
tion and build urban-regional resilience. Dodman et al. (2010) demonstrate the
power of community-led adaptive strategies to reduce disaster risk in the face of
environmental change. One potentially problematic aspect of the ecosystem ser-
vices perspective is the temptation to attach monetary values to the various services,
linked to the payment for ecosystem services (PES) approach favoured by some
international agencies. Although intended to ensure that these biophysical functions
are not undervalued, the result is often that only services to which monetary values
can be attached are regarded as valuable, and/or that ability to pay becomes the basis
of entitlement, thereby introducing potentially serious inequalities of access.
Although distinctive in some ways, urban and peri-urban political ‘hot-spots’
provide further illustrations and interesting potential scenarios of how climate
change-induced events may impact in peri-urban interfaces in future, triggering
rapid population displacements and regional food insecurity. Recent examples
include Afghanistan, Sudan’s Darfur region, occupied Palestinian territories,
Somalia and South Sudan, in all of which political conflicts are impacting on agri-
cultural processes or flows in ways which broadly anticipate the negative conditions
and consequences that are likely to emerge from climate change. The sustainable
agriculture and food security lessons that were learnt in Cuba during the early
1990s’ era of oil scarcity provide the classic example of this phenomenon. Following
the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent cessation of subsidised imports of
Soviet oil and oil-based agrochemicals, Cuban farmers could no longer irrigate and
fertilise their fields as previously practised during the subsided Soviet era (Wright
2009). The effects of these two agricultural constraints provide a possible foretaste
of climatic-induced events, for example the effects of limited irrigation are similar
to those of increased rainwater variability (no longer having the right amount of
water at the right time on the field). In relation to soil fertility, the effects of a sudden
lack of fertilisers are similar to those likely to emerge during warmer climatic
72 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

conditions, including increased soil degradation and a higher carbon decomposition

rate in soils, ultimately leaving agricultural plots nutrient deficient and prone to
erosion.
Sustainable PUI management clearly involves a high degree of integrative plan-
ning using an urban-regional approach that draws from a multitude of urban and
rural planning approaches to transcend the traditional town and country or urban
and rural dichotomies of social construct, political entity and planning paradigm.
While this combination of planning methods and design tools lies at the core of a
hybrid planning and design approach, it also draws strongly on urban and peri-
urban natural resource management, not in the context of a utopian vision of urban
self-reliance but rather as a means to promote urban and peri-urban resilience and
sustainability through enhanced food security, conservation of natural resources and
use of ecological protection to reduce disaster risk in urban and peri-urban areas. An
example of how linkages can be made between the conventional disaster manage-
ment cycle and (peri-)urban agriculture is illustrated in Fig. 5.4. Here, agriculture is
being used as the conduit for a range of capacity-building measures, including
disaster preparedness and risk reduction through enhancement of community cohe-
sion. This provides the foundation since strong community networks can then be
utilised to implement a range of specially related disaster risk reduction measures
such as early warning and evacuation response plans which require a high degree of
community organisation in order to work effectively. Urban agriculture sites can
also be used for zoning vulnerable and fragile areas such as steep slopes and the

Fig. 5.4 Conventional disaster management cycle with urban agriculture linkages (Source: Adam-
Bradford et al. 2009)
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 73

sides of urban and peri-urban river systems, while increased food security forms a
key component of urban resilience (Adam-Bradford et al. 2009).
The linkage between agriculture and resilience is again central in the concept of
‘stabilisation agriculture’, a term coined by Phillip Harris at the Centre of
Agroecology and Food Security,1 Coventry University in 2010. Stabilisation agri-
culture focuses on enhancing the ecological and social resilience of agricultural
communities to withstand and respond to adverse conditions in countries affected
by natural and human-induced disasters. In the pre-disaster phase, agroecology can,
for example, be used as a land management tool in disaster risk reduction pro-
grammes, while in the post-disaster phase the aim of stabilisation agriculture is the
swift re-establishment of primary food production systems that are more resilient
than previous systems. The six main components of stabilisation agriculture include:
(i) Integrating and mainstreaming agroecology through programmes, policies and
institutions, for disaster risk reduction (DRR).
(ii) Agroecology for refugee camps and settlements.
(iii) Urban agriculture for dispersed refugees and host communities in urban areas.
(iv) Facilitating transitions: a) food aid to food production; b) refugees to returnees
and; c) combatants to farmers.
(v) Sustainable management of abiotic stresses in agriculture, such as drought,
salinity, contaminated land and climate change.
(vi) Sustainable management of biotic stresses in agriculture, such as invasive
plant species and insect plagues.
Stabilisation agriculture embraces an integrated and participatory approach to
the management of agriculture in disasters and emergencies in both rural and urban
settings. As a result, programme ‘beneficiaries’ are transformed into pro-active
agents of change, through processes that empower local communities, including
refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and host communities. Integration is
achieved at the programme, policy and institutional level, thus building capacity for
local governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and UN agencies, to
support communities to scale-up and facilitate stabilisation agriculture interven-
tions (Adam-Bradford et al. 2009; Sutton and Cheese 2011).
Many of these stabilisation agricultural components are highly relevant in the
PUI context, particularly because in post-disaster scenarios, the PUI often experi-
ences acute population influxes, exacerbated land degradation and resource deple-
tion as is currently occurring in peri-urban areas of Somalia, as Tilstone (2011: 2)
highlights in her analysis on addressing climatic-induced disasters in pastoral areas,
It is becoming clear that unless local capacities are built, and underlying vulnerabilities
reduced in this increasingly unpredictable environment, the potential of pastoralism to sup-
port millions of people – on land suited to little else – will be undermined. Governments
and development agencies will be faced with the far more intractable problem of sustaining
even larger numbers of unskilled peri-urban dwellers in remote and low potential areas.

1
Known as the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience since 2014.
74 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

Future interventions will require extensive capacity building so that individuals

and local authorities can make better-informed decisions which can then be sup-
ported through public and donor investment (REGLAP et al. 2011). In drylands,
such as the Horn of Africa, integrating the PUI in long-term planning will be crucial
for sustainability and resilience. The control and access to land, protecting commu-
nal land rights, and the traditional decision-making bodies that should determine
development priorities, all require urgent attention if natural resource-based liveli-
hoods are to be protected, and developed, in the PUI (REGLAP et al. 2011). In the
context of dryland recovery and development, REGLAP et al. (2011: 47) highlight
the requirement for ‘building community capacity to determine development priori-
ties, control natural resources and monitor the use of funds’, along with appropriate
education and investment in pro-poor infrastructures including financial services,
market infrastructure, secondary roads, telecommunications and information provi-
sion. Such integrated approaches will be critical for the peri-urban spaces in these
regions and this will require a determined hybrid planning approach to ensure the
PUI functions sustainably rather than becoming the next environmentally degraded
informal settlements dependent on external aid.
Even in non-disaster PUI situations, complex, fast-changing and often ambigu-
ous land tenure systems are characteristic (McGregor et al. 2006; Adam 2014), yet
relatively secure access to cultivable land without risk to personal safety is a prereq-
uisite for any form of agriculture. Along with coherent and integrative institutional
governance, this is frequently unavailable in dynamic PUIs, which merely high-
lights the contrast between the integrated and sustainable precolonial systems and
the harsh realities of most present-day contexts outside of the OECD countries.
However, the diversity of conditions belies easy generalisation and even within
tropical Africa, for instance, the extent and nature of urban and peri-urban agricul-
ture and forestry (UPAF) vary from negligible to substantial and commercial. A
recent meta-study has indicated the conditions – consistent with the analysis above –
under which it can not only help to alleviate the poverty of practitioners but also
contribute to urban food security and mitigation and adaptation to climate change
(Lwasa et al. 2014, 2015) if farmers are themselves able to adapt their practices to
changing environmental conditions (Odewumi et al. 2013) (Fig. 5.5).
Integrated approaches are likely to evolve in response to particular historical
opportunities rather than as a result of technocratic planning (Friedmann and
Weaver 1979: 206). Clear examples are the reactive urban agriculture programmes
including the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign in Britain during the Second World War,
and more recently in ‘Operation Feed Yourself’ implemented in Ghana during the
1970s, and the ‘Special Period in Peace Time’ implemented in Cuba during the
1990s. Momen (2009) provides a recent example from Nepal, demonstrating how a
municipality has fostered a more integrated approach to rural-urban linkages and
micro-enterprise development that has helped reduce exploitative socio-spatial
relations. Contemporary examples include two programmes now being imple-
mented in peri-urban areas of Somalia: the Somalia Resilience Program (SomReP)
funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and the
Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS) programme funded by the UK
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 75

Fig. 5.5 Peri-urban riverbank agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria, with flood erosion evident (© David
Simon)

Department for International Development (DFID). These programmes each com-

prise two different consortia of international non-government organisations target-
ing peri-urban areas with a focus on pastoralism, agro-pastoralism and peri-urban
livelihoods. In response to weak local institutions, these projects are adopting a
multi-sectoral approach that includes capacity building, community mobilisation
and participatory planning, with the aim of building resilience into these rapidly
expanding peri-urban areas.
As argued above, successful integrated and locally appropriate planning was
once practised in contexts such as the pre-industrial and pre-colonial walled cities
of West Africa, and the low-density urban-based complexes of Angkor in Cambodia
and the classic Aztec and Mayan cities of Meso-America. While such settlements
and urban patterns were embedded within very different global contexts and stable
land tenure regimes, the level of integration and the technical sophistication of the
planning and design involved clearly offer way markers when considering the chal-
lenges facing the sustainable and participatory management of urban and peri-urban
areas in an era marked by rapid urbanisation and globalisation, climate change
uncertainty, unequal access to energy, increased geo-political tensions in water-
scarce regions, and declining agricultural productivity in many rural areas.
Food security, environmental integrity and heritage conservation are widespread
challenges across the spectrum of peri-urbanisation processes worldwide. Ayutthaya,
76 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

the historic capital of Thailand before its relocation to Bangkok 50 km further south,
provides an acute example of globalisation-related pressures in economically
dynamic regions of the world-economy. This growing urban region now forms a
peri-urban part of the Bangkok Extended Metropolitan Region, which attracts some
90 % of foreign direct investment into Thailand. The rapid expansion of transna-
tional corporate manufacturing, and the infrastructural, housing and population
pressures associated with it, have created profound challenges for the conservation
of the old ruined capital, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as for the
maintenance of environmental services and rice production in what is a highly pro-
ductive and intensely cultivated rice-growing basin of global importance. Current
governance and planning institutions are fragmented and grossly inadequate to this
task (Maneepong and Webster 2008). Although these authors advocate a strengthen-
ing of high-level governance institutions as a result, we suggest that traditional top-
down mechanisms alone will not succeed without active community engagement
and an integrated approach adopting the holistic principles outlined above. Such
integrated and multidimensional approaches also entail practical implications for
research and any subsequent intervention in the PUI.
Similar concerns apply in China, where Beijing’s substantial expansion since the
early 1980s has shifted its PUI progressively outwards. The current PUI is experi-
encing complex dynamics linked to ongoing marketisation, an increasingly dichot-
omised land tenure system and the establishment of new middle income communities,
often drawn from the ranks of migrants from other regions (the so-called yi zu ‘ant
people’ who lack local registration and benefits under what remains of the hukou
permit system). They face discrimination and often remain on temporary jobs
despite being well educated and holding responsible skilled jobs. Perhaps linked to
this, novel forms of collective and ‘incomplete ownership housing’ village organisa-
tion are emerging, while – as elsewhere – development management remains frag-
mented and hence ineffective (Zhao 2012).
Mounting evidence indicates clearly that effective peri-urban management
requires high levels of local participation and ownership (McGregor et al. 2006;
Dodman et al. 2010). Hence research methodologies are crucial aspects of planning
and design and should incorporate a well-informed community focus through par-
ticipatory action research or co-production. While participatory technology devel-
opment works best in promoting the interests of the poor and marginalised in the
PUI, such interventions must remain affordable and based upon self-help.
Community participation and mobilisation are also crucial to promoting sustain-
ability, a prime requirement for PUI work, particularly in regard to environmental
sustainability. Conducting such research requires frameworks for each distinct scale
of research focus, as different data will be required to inform the way forward at
multiple scales, hence interventionist and pro-poor strategies must be carefully
researched and executed.
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 77

5.5 Concluding Remarks

We have argued that current institutionalised planning paradigms and practices

almost invariably fail to address the essential dynamic processes of change that
characterise PUIs worldwide. This reflects an abiding dichotomy within all-too-
rigid planning systems based on often numerous politico-administrative territorial
units which are deemed to be either predominantly urban or rural. Conventional
land-use zoning and related standards and regulations also remain outdated and fail
to keep pace with ongoing changes. By contrast, recent archaeological evidence
from different regions is demonstrating that sophisticated and integrated urban sys-
tems comprising extensive areas that we would identify as agricultural PUIs existed
over long periods of time. These sustained urban populations and gave them
resilience.
In today’s complex and rapidly changing world, fragmented urban planning can-
not succeed. Instead, strategic or integrated urban planning across local authority
categories and boundaries is needed in order to provide coherence and a holistic
approach to functional urban areas. Such systems need to remain flexible and more
permissive in order to cope with the dynamics of change and unorthodox combina-
tions of activity that characterise PUIs almost everywhere. Most existing systems
remain rigid and restrictive in orientation. Hence the hybrid planning approach
advocated here requires the integration of multiple approaches and perspectives,
including agropolitan development, disaster risk reduction, environmental change
mitigation and adaptation, integrated watershed management, ecosystem services
and stabilisation agriculture.
Commitment to peri-urban or urban fringe issues by individual local authorities
that are either urban or rural in nature or statutory classification is often low because
such areas lie on their territorial and often political margins. One rationale for inte-
grated functional-area planning is to overcome this marginality. Equally, the gener-
ally inadequate levels of capacity and resourcing for local or metropolitan
governance institutions at the urban fringe represent a handicap that must be
addressed. In many parts of the world, urban expansion over time means that
different land tenure (e.g. forms of communal and individualised) and planning
systems may exist within a single urban area, presenting often intractable strategic
and practical/routine problems. In the absence of coherent strategies to address this,
creeping de facto individualisation of tenure in communally-based areas often wid-
ens socio-economic disparities, thus greatly complicating the existing challenges of
how to address the conflicting resource needs and demands of rich and poor house-
holds, often with diverse cultural and class priorities, within individual localities
and across an urban area. As a result, post-structural approaches have been applied
to urban planning for some time – arguing the need for flexible, responsive and
hybrid planning that blends traditional and modern, indigenous and ‘international’
architectural styles, technologies and urban idioms in locally appropriate ways. As
Acevedo and Carreira (2011: 66) conclude in their analysis of such challenges in
Medellín, Colombia,
78 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

It is not a matter of development or stagnation; rather, it is a process in which traditions and

uses modify, re-interpret and re-create those models imposed under the development ideal.
When the dynamics between what is planned and how this is used by real people and local
communities are understood as a totality, it would be possible to create more versatile and
adequate responses to the challenges of a dynamic society moving towards a global order.

This applies no less directly to the dynamic mixture of people, activities and land
uses that comprise the PUI, which is very much part of the urban ‘totality’. However,
the novelty of what we are proposing here is underscored by the very limited coverage
of peri-urban areas in the Global Report on Human Settlements 2009, the theme of
which was ‘Planning Sustainable Cities’ (UN-HABITAT 2009). While PUIs are men-
tioned briefly in a number of places, this comprised mainly general statements about
the rapidity and predominant informality of growth and urbanisation there, and the
challenges that this presents for coherent urban planning and the installation and
upgrading of services and infrastructure. The principal focus of the report remained
resolutely urban and although its arguments for substantive changes to rigid, modern-
ist, blueprint-style planning based on outdated norms, regulations and standards were
well made, there is little firm planning advice for those concerned with PUIs and they
appear somehow still to be conceived of as a separate suite of evolving spaces, in that,
for instance, “[n]ew and incremental approaches to service and infrastructure deliv-
ery, in partnership with local communities, will have to be found” (p. 203) (see the
final summary for some of the policy recommendations this raises). This could equally
well be said of unserviced area within cities. Surprisingly, integration of PUIs with the
growing cities that spawn them and with which they are increasingly functionally
bound up, is not advocated and the planning advice is equally vague and equivocal:
A further issue is whether the planning of peri-urban areas calls for local or regional plan-
ning action, and which level of government is best placed to deal with such areas. A com-
bination of regional and local planning approaches may well be required (UN-HABITAT
2009: 203).

Such issues and dynamic, even contradictory, pressures are not restricted to mega-
conurbations or even just large cities that interface between local, national, regional
and global economies. They apply globally across the urban spectrum in terms of
better integrating urban areas into their peri-urban and regional hinterlands. The pre-
cise dynamics of change in the PUI of individual urban areas are contingent but plan-
ners and city managers are very often reduced to little more than spectators.
Conventional wisdoms can be inverted; contradictions and discontinuities abound.
For instance, as Klaufus’ (2010: 135) comparative study of remittance economies and
the growth of Quetzaltenango (Guatemala) and San Miguel (El Salvador) concludes,
Intermediate Central American cities face rapid urbanisation on the fringes. Whereas
uncontrolled urban growth used to be associated with informal self-provision of houses,
suburban disorder is now attributed to fully serviced residential projects for a new middle
class, built on ecologically vulnerable land. Target groups are remittance-receiving families
or other people with access to foreign currency These gated communities are spatially seg-
regated from the rest of the city, sometimes even designed as parallel cities. The construc-
tion of private water supply systems causes a reduction in groundwater levels, while
deforestation in higher areas where urbanisation projects are developed causes flooding in
lower urban areas.
5 Archaeology and Contemporary Dynamics for More Sustainable, Resilient Cities… 79

In the very different context of peri-urban Zanzibar island in Tanzania, Myers

(2010) illustrates the heterogeneity of ‘place making’ by individuals and house-
holds, often defined in terms of their personal relationships with elements of the
state. These in turn have specific historical roots, and the diverse and even conflict-
ing interests militate against efforts at coherence or even alternative, bottom-up and
more sustainable planning than what has resulted from the failed modernist legacy.
Yet, in peri-urban Maputo, where the state still technically owns all land, fragmenta-
tion is also occurring although technically illegal informal markets appear to oper-
ate quite efficiently (Kihato et al. 2012).
These few examples attest to the diversity of situations and processes which are
remaking peri-urban spaces everywhere through territorial disintegration and urban
fragmentation, generally on the basis of wealth and political power through growing
marketisation, whatever the formal legal situation. This indicates the strength of the
challenges to be overcome if the integrative and holistic approaches we advocate
and which we believe to be essential to achieving greater urban and peri-urban sus-
tainability, equitability and resilience are to become practicable in dynamic, fast-
growing contexts. Equally, recent literature from various parts of Europe and
elsewhere in the OECD suggests that many peri-urban interfaces there are far more
dynamic than portrayed in earlier literature and that similar issues and concerns
over ambiguities and weaknesses of governance frequently exist. To some extent, at
least, the increasing adoption of peri-urban nomenclature and approaches in
European literature symbolises an effort to break down intellectual and geopolitical
ghettos and open up these dynamic spaces of fragmented place making for mutual
learning.

Acknowledgments Preliminary versions of this chapter were presented at the Thirtieth

Anniversary Conference of the International Development Planning Review, University of
Liverpool, April 2009, and the session on Peri-urban natures; regenerations and reinterpretations
of peri-urban places and concepts, Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers,
Seattle, 15 April 2011. In this form, it was presented at the Peri-urban 2014 conference at the
University of Western Sydney, July 2014. Participation of Andrew Adam-Bradford in this work
was supported through the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research grant
RES-064-27-0025. Jenny Kynaston drew Fig. 5.1. Helpful feedback from participants in the above
conference sessions, Katherine Gough, referees, the editors are greatly appreciated.

Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s)
and source are credited.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work’s Creative
Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included
in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory
regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or
reproduce the material.
80 D. Simon and A. Adam-Bradford

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