Living in Central Peripheries

The retroactive reading of the planned city, allows balancing the relation between the ville (the physically built context) and the cité (the character of the urban life) (Sennett). When we build a new fragment of the city, the balance between "the lived and the built" will certify, or not, the fact that "the simply urbanised space is not a city" (M. Soto). In this sense, the research questions which are the contemporary conditions that allow a new urban fragment to be part of the "city making" (Solá-Morales). The relationship between "life and form" (Gehl) is experienced and measured through the quality of public space and architecture, the feeling of belonging, the demographic diversity (Jacobs), the real value of the pre-existence, the efficiency of mobility, or the sustainability of urban planning.
In Denmark, economic growth has fostered new urban developments such as Nordhavn (Copenhagen) or Aarhus Ø (Aarhus), both located on an artificial central seafront. They constitute the two major developments in the two largest and important cities of the country and evidence a trend that appears in other secondary Danish coastal cities. Aarhusgade is the first phase of Nordhavn's development, and is the result of the transformation of an industrial sector into residential space. Aarhus Ø is a residential neighbourhood built on a large concrete platform formerly occupied by port logistics uses. Once both developments have been realized and nearly completed, it is time to "check the efficiency of physical planning" as claimed by Banham, Barker, Hall, and Price in "Non-Plan: An experiment in freedom" (1969). In consequence, a critical, retroactive and collective analysis takes place based on the immersion in physical reality, experiencing the built through the everyday on-site city life, photography and press reports, in order to measure the distance from planning to life in the central peripheries.