Metropolitan Peripheries as New Urban Landscapes. Designing a Co-Creative Toolbox for the Integrated Development of the Vienna City Region

Contemporary processes of structural change, such as growing regional disparities as well as pressing challenges of social and climatic change, permeate and shape many metropolitan areas worldwide. Moreover, in the face of continuous population growth and limited spatial resources, many cities have grown beyond their administrative borders, pointing to strong rural-urban interdependencies as well as necessary cross-border cooperation. With big cities as the dominant urban core, it is often the peri-urban municipalities of urban regions that have to deal with the consequences of extensive urban sprawl and lacking public transportation infrastructure. As the ongoing urbanisation trend transforms cities, towns and villages into fragmented hybrid urban landscapes, where the use of conventional planning instruments quickly reaches its limits, integrated and multidimensional development strategies for metropolitan areas are needed. The case study of the Vienna city region not only illustrates the negative effects of uncoordinated spatial planning that stops at administrative borders, but also shows alternative future-oriented development potentials.

The development of future visions for metropolitan areas and the moderation of complex regional planning and design processes are some of the many services provided by the MetroLab. Building on the case study of the SuperWien Metropole – a vivid vision for the greater Vienna region stretching from Vienna and Wiener Neustadt to Bratislava – the transnational and interdisciplinary team succeeded in initiating a discussion on metropolitan planning by means of innovative tools and approaches. The profound analysis and provocative-artistic visualisation of the spatial-functional development of this agglomeration as well as the launched International Dialoge on Metropolitan Planning are essential components of a comprehensive co-creative toolbox specifically designed to discuss and tackle challenges of cross-border spatial development. Taking up the approach of translocal learning and drawing on international examples and the fruitful knowledge exchange between international and local experts, the first two MetroLab Forums have shown that settlement and mobility development must be thought of together more strongly than has been done so far. Sprawling peripheral concurbations and, in particular, their residents are thus included in further case study processing to reimagine and reshape development opportunities by translating metropolitan visions and strategies into local actions. The project aims to not only strengthen sustainable intra-regional growth by focussing on the multi-level and cross-border development of those new hybrid urban landscapes located at what is usually referred to as periphery, but also to explore the interplay between comprehensive strategy development on a metropolitan scale and the identification of place-based solutions on a local scale. Finally, this implies drawing further conclusions in terms of integrated multilevel governance considering horizontal networking as well as vertical connectivity as essential strategic levels. Keywords: urban growth, sprawl, co-creation, cross-border development, dialogue-oriented planning and design, planning tools, metropolitan strategies, place-based solutions