| Intraphery |
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| PIONEERS OF THE PERIPHERY BORDER AREAS, urban
limits and peripheries are excellent locations for functions regarded
as problematic by the city. As it grows, the advancing city continues
to push these activities ever outwards.With the Westergouwe area development,
Gouda has reached its maximum limits. If there are no more boundary changes
over the coming period, then Gouda will need to use its existing municipal
area even more intensively than it has to date. The scarcity of space
will ensure that the peripheral functions the town has been used to pushing
outwards will in future be projected back into the urban area. The traditional periphery In
urban development, the periphery is linked to the centre. Traditionally,
urban centres provided safety, a regulatory framework (bye–laws,
etc.) and local administration of justice. Outside these safe and ordered
settlements there was an area of relative disorder, anarchy, tolerance
and opportunism. This flexible zone was essential to the town’s healthy
development. Firstly, it enabled the centre to become and remain orderly
by providing a place for anything that posed a threat, e.g. refuse dumps
polluting industries. The periphery’s second significance was that
it contained far more and cheaper land than the town itself. Functions
that required space or were low–profit could be located there: municipal
gardens, cemeteries, municipal shipyards. Third, the periphery was a seed–bed
of innovation; pioneers set up here to embark on new ventures and experiments.
Finally, the periphery played a vital role in the town’s expansion.
As facilities increased, the periphery was automatically incorporated
into the municipal area and the same process would then be repeated further
out. The peripheral condition The 1874 Garrisons Act relieved the towns of their defensive functions and the fortifications could be demolished. The spatial constraints on many towns disappeared and urban expansion accelerated. This, together with the transport developments, changed both the centres and the peripheries. The peripheries have become the centre, the centres having taken on certain peripheral characteristics. By now, most towns and cities have a formalised boundary, so that peripheral development is forced inward to abandoned sites, postwar housing areas and urban vacuums – small planning–free enclaves within the urban area. While urban laws apply and facilities are available, there is also a manifest need for temporary use, lax regulation and administrative tolerance. This need remains despite the impossibility of a genuinely peripheral use, and translates into the search for fresh opportunities. The Gouda periphery Gouda
wants to keep growing despite not having either the physical space or
the necessary housing contingents. In the circumstances, a solution can
be found by applying peripheral housing models in urban areas. Possibilities
include semi–permanent or nomadic homes falling outside the housing
regulations but still attractive and able to provide varied living conditions,
or the maintenance of an area with large plots for preserving low–value
functions. Intraphery In Gouda, new initiatives are increasingly emerging in the centre and the housing districts. This is the new incarnation of the periphery: the intraphery. A church in a parking garage, a green balcony becomes a market stall, bonsai hobbyists start a garden centre in their back garden while, on the third floor, pornography amateurs set up a film studio. In a dilapidated area, a Moroccan Mercedes dealer working from his own garage gives the community a fresh boost. |
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Intraphery is part of the Art of Settling |