Marianne Skjulhaug - Elsewhere and Otherness: A study of the concept of local community through the lense of peri-urban asylum reception centers in Norway.
By highlighting aspects of peri-urban conditions, such as temporality, sense of place, and community, this study identifies vital dilemmas and challenges connected to the intertwining of public and political discourse with the physical realities of urban space in a regional context. The peri-urban is constituted by urban practices locating outside the city cores within the rural. The peri-urban condition is a hybrid landscape characterized by a multi-layered co-existence of urban and rural land-uses, as well as the coexistence of heterogenic urban uses. The peri urban condition is established when urban practices locate in rural areas, the peri-urban condition is not necessarily visible physically (Qvistrom).
Asylum reception centers are an urban practice, often located in peri-urban settings. In this sense it is relevant to consider Asylum reception centers as a peri-urban topic. (Simonsen, Skjulhaug, Mierswa).
In 2016, almost 40 per cent of Norwegian asylum reception centres (ARCs) were located in so-called peri-urban landscapes across the country. In media coverage and central planning documents, however, geographical location seems rarely to be considered as potentially crucial to the well-being of asylum seekers or their integration. While peri-urban locations do not necessarily mean poor living standards, the location certainly influences practical opportunities to participate in the host community and its peri-urban landscapes.
The research has several aims. First, the project reads, analyses and conceptualizes current conditions and developments in the peri-urban. Second, it aims to raise awareness and produce new knowledge on what kind of policies and mechanisms that come into play when urban practices and programs locate into the peri-urban. With support from literature, I argue that managing change in the peri-urban landscape requires well-informed, knowledge-based spatial planning and design concepts. Third and more specifically the research delves into how current peri-urban development, such as acute societal spatial needs of locating asylum reception centres deploy sense of place and community specifically within peri-urban conditions when living in the margins.
The peri-urban, which in theoretical discourse is largely perceived through its lack of ‘public sphere’(Sieverts), as well as scattered and uncoordinated land use, also seems to perform as a flexible receptor of suddenly emerging or urgent social programs such as ARCs. The question is then how this flexibility, which seems to run counter to prevailing notions of local community (nærmiljø), can be conceptualized in new and constructive ways. This research asks: What opportunities emerge for urban/rural forms of everyday life in the peri-urban land? The thesis focuses in particular on what it means to be living in peri-urban landscapes and what kind of spatial opportunities emerge from urban dynamics in the peri-urban land.
By studying current peri-urban localization practices of asylum reception centers in Norway and how asylum seekers engage in their temporary neighbourhoods/communities and landscapes, the aim is to understand better:
• How can living in peri-urban conditions be (re)conceptualized?
• What urban dynamics, policies, and mechanisms come into play when urban practices and programs concerning acute, societal and spatial needs, such as locating asylum reception centres, locate into the peri-urban?
• What forms does a sense of place and community take within peri-urban conditions explored through the lens of displaced people living on the margins of society?
Institute of Urbanism and Landscape / Peter Hemmersam (Supervisor)
PhD started in 2015