Sense-Making in the Urban Fringe
Investigating the peri-urban as a site of provisional sense-making.
The peri-urban implies a wide array of spatial forms and social phenomena produced by the conversion from rural to urban: leisure hubs, industrial parks, and agricultural areas existing alongside unplanned housing, conflicts over land use, and labour disputes. The term is often used to refer to the excess identifications of cities in transition, requiring architectural designs that can be easily repurposed and labour forces adaptable to various kinds of low-paid work. The informal, communal, and clandestine mix with generic forms of urbanisation, while its provisional inclusion makes the peri-urban more exposed to rapid economic shifts (Allen 2003).
This research theme investigates flexible negotiations over ‘weak identity’ between economic communities in peri-urban spaces (Žlender 2025, Bryant 1995). How do the social, political, artistic, and economic forms of the fringe affect the ‘stronger’ identities either side of it? This theme seeks to generate critical and creative work that addresses the sense-making processes of peri-urban lifeworlds.
- 'Deindustrialisation and the Selfish Gene', 'Cultivating Dreamworlds', and 'Toxic Infrastructure' in Narrative in the Age of the Genome (Bloomsbury, 2021)
- 'Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit', in Medical Humanities (2021)
- 'Epidemiological Plots and the National Syndrome', in The Sociological Review (2022)
- 'Welfare Fictions and the Brixton Uprising', Literature and Institutions of Welfare: Essays and Studies (2024)
Academic lead
Dr Lara Choksey is Lecturer in UCL English, Associate Faculty at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, and a member of the Urban Lab Cross-Faculty Collective.
Contact L.Choksey@ucl.ac.uk to propose activities or connect with our work under this priority area.