Palermo Metro-Peripheries: The Role of Peripheries in a Metropolitan Perspective

Abstract

The deep change in functional, political, and symbolic relations between core and peripheries in European metropolitan dynamics has blurred the current categories of “periphery” and “core”. The periphery is no longer a homogeneous reality, but a dynamic and fragmented urban landscape. The institution of new territorial bodies in Italy, with the metropolitan cities and new forms of institutional collaboration between territorial bodies, is a new political framework that calls for new solutions in regional policy-making in order to overcome the radial (core-centric) urban model: peripheries are not longer satellites of core cities' development but realities that, in a wider view, have a new spatial and relational centrality in a metropolitan perspective. The challenges of metro-peripheries can only be successful if all tiers of planning and decision-making are willing and committed to cooperate in strategic development processes: a “multilayered” governance, as balanced combination of bottom-up and top down processes, acting at micro/meso and macro scales.