Key conclusions relating to the planning visions, investments, jobs and livelihoods, governance, housing, land, social processes and retail and consumption of African peripheries have been advanced in each chapter of this book. The articulation of key findings in relation to the five logics of urban peripheries are outlined in the introductory chapter, drawn on throughout the book where relevant, to illustrate and extend analytically a variety of arguments. This final chapter presents brief concluding comments in relation to three key elements, namely the value of urban comparison, the book’s analytical contributions to core literatures along with reflections on the value and limits of our conceptual framework to the study of urban peripheries more generally and finally some policy implications of the arguments and evidence detailed in the various chapters. We see this book as restarting a conversation about urban peripheries by foregrounding African city-regions and – crucially – the lived experience of people living there, rather than taking structural processes or arbitrary rural–urban distinctions as our main entry point. As such, we offer our approach as one possible road into comprehending these dynamic spaces.

The value of urban comparison

A core aim of this book was to illustrate the value of urban comparison, drawing on Robinson’s (2016, 2022) framings of genetic and conceptually generative comparative tactics. We recognise and build on her argument that any understanding of the urban should be underpinned by a ‘double multiplicity’, in the sense of being ‘grounded in a multiplicity of experiences and observations’ as well as subject to ‘a potential multiplicity of conceptualisations’ (2022: 6). While ‘genetic’ and ‘generative’ are conceptualised separately by Robinson, they are not so much separate forms of comparative process as ‘two grounds for comparative urban practice’ (2022: 11; emphasis added). As such, a study may be (and ours indeed is) rooted in both genetic and generative framings, tracing the intertwined genesis of peripheral formations while also generating new concepts. Our focus on genetic tactics targeted an understanding of historical processes, drivers of urban change and the multiple everyday experiences of African urban peripheries. We address these three elements in turn.

Historical processes, including the making of these places and key drivers of change, were explicitly detailed within analyses of planning and urban visions within the South African and Ethiopian peripheries (Chapter 1) and interrogations of state and private sector investments therein (Chapter 2), as well as investigations of the histories and current realities of housing in South Africa and Ethiopia (Chapters 5 and 6). We supplemented this with assessments of changes to landownership and markets in Accra, Ghana (Chapter 7), tracing colonial impacts and more recent reductions in the powers of customary authorities. Chapter 4 examined changing governance institutions and practices at varying scales, also important drivers in shaping urban peripheries, using an historical lens to identify critical contestations particularly associated with borders and demarcation. These analyses reveal how the intersections and particularities of political and economic regimes over time have worked to produce urban peripheries, centring temporality as critical in understanding the peripheries, their evolutions and how such spaces are now lived. Robinson defines genetic tactics as ‘tracing the interconnected genesis of repeated, related but distinctive, urban outcomes’ (2016: 195), which can ‘reveal elements of the flows and interactions which make up the process of urbanisation’ (2022: 138). Our historical investigations reveal some ‘genetically connected’ phenomena both within country contexts (e.g. historic investment strategies tied to apartheid policies across different spaces in South Africa) and between countries, for example in terms of the ideas about the catalytic potential of industrial zones and benefits of homeownership that informed peripheral development in both countries. Yet they also evidence significant variation across the urban, both within and between country contexts (South Africa, Ethiopia and Ghana), depending on how history, location, politics and economics collide in specific peripheral contexts.

Genetic comparison was central to our analyses of drivers of urban change. Analyses of distinct governance practices as central drivers of change (including producing decline and contestation), leading vanguard interventions and aiding speculative investments, produce core comparisons throughout the book, as do the absences or failings of governance practices which produce or facilitate auto-construction. Land is a fundamental variable in urban peripheries, explicitly examined through the critical and changing role of land markets as a key driver of change in Accra’s peripheries (Chapter 7), but also central in our Ethiopian and South African cases, including with respect to how land is sourced and acquired for major housing and infrastructure cases. The focus on customary authority (in both Accra and South African cases) and rising contestation over land informs our analysis of hybrid governance and also the centrality of land in servicing the powers of ‘big men’ in various South African cases. It also points to an area ripe for further consideration, that of comparisons of land markets, authority, pricing and changing land use across African peripheries.

Significant comparisons are evident in the book of how places and urban change are produced and experienced in relation to infrastructure (Chapter 9), including through housing programmes (Chapters 5 and 6). Comparison across cases reveals that although big infrastructure is evident, its role in shaping the lived peripheries is varied, and small-scale/micro-infrastructures are key urban elements conditioning everyday life. For example, issues around street lighting or sanitation facilities appear to have more meaning for people living in the peripheries of Addis Ababa than the proximity of major railway investments, which were barely mentioned as drivers of change. Retail and consumption in the peripheries of South Africa and Ethiopia (Chapter 11) constitute a core but comparatively distinct driver of change tied to diverse strategies. Desires for homeownership and affordable housing are dominant drivers of urban change, evident through comparison of cases in Accra, Addis Ababa and the South African cases, where take-up (and at times subsequent rejection) of state housing and investment in property or house-building on the fringes of cities shape movement patterns and the viability and density of settlements.

Genetic comparison here is again a complex and productive tactic. Much of the evidence of ‘repeated urban phenomena’ occurs where state intervention is partial (such as the co-occurence of experiences of infrastructural limitations of new housing neighbourhoods in Addis Ababa and Lufhereng, South Africa) or where wider processes such as commodification, deindustrialisation, political contestation, rising unaffordability and poor articulation of policy integration work to produce nearly predictable outcomes of marginalisation, suffering and insecurity for many living in peripheral spaces. Governance practices and their unfolding over time and within spaces are less directly comparable across Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. Instead, we see quite significant variation in how centralised and powerful regimes interconnect with the politics and practices of citizens, formalised community groups, customary authorities, localised and often powerful actors and newly emerging committee structures. Genetic comparison here fosters insights through difference generated at the national scale, manifested and reshaped locally, but it also poses key questions for how comparison across other African urban contexts is likely to generate further variation but also repetition of phenomena.

Comparing lived experiences across multiple African urban peripheries as a genetic tactic produced a cacophony of insights and often generated the most easily comparable observations across all countries and cases. Here, the art of ‘living the peripheries’ proved a critical axis of comparison, with residents’ embodied, experiential accounts proving highly comparable, although with significant contextual variation. In this book particular chapters really evidence these comparative perspectives through the voices of residents in seven different case study contexts, primarily within Ethiopia and South Africa. Asafo’s analysis of the transformations occurring within land markets in peri-urban Accra, Ghana, focuses more on actors engaged in land markets and less on the lived experiences of these (drawing on qualitative accounts), although Asafo’s wider publications speak directly to these experiential dimensions (see Asafo, 2020, 2022). The lived experiences of jobs and livelihoods (Chapter 3) in urban peripheries reveal the limits of generating local jobs in peripheral locations. The ongoing reliance on urban centres for employment (with implications for commuting, disposable income and time with family) for some peripherally located residents was evident in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia (discussed in Chapters 7 and 8). Here, and surfaced in other chapters, comparisons across cases point to the relative precarity for many living the peripheries of African cities but also that the peripheries are sites of wealth, for the middle classes and the urban rich, who choose edge locations because land and costs often facilitate a high-quality lifestyle or at least an affordable lifestyle.

Peripheries as key spaces for living, migrating and relocating are evident across all cases. In Ghana, intra-urban migration to plots of land purchased in Accra’s peripheries facilitates affordable private housing construction, albeit incrementally, while cheap, often unserviced land supports the auto-construction of poorer peripheral settlements sites, evident across South Africa and Ethiopia, supporting housing needs of migrants from various locations. State housing shapes living in the peripheries through the production of homeownership, access to (often costly) services and new affordability constraints. Immobility, stuckness and extensive travel times are relatively consistent comparative experiences detailed in Chapter 8 but noted also in Accra’s peripheral cases. These emphasise the geographic characteristics of urban peripheries privileged in this book, underscoring that location does matter and that despite investments across urban peripheries, cost and the infrequent transportation commonly work to exclude and marginalise peripheral dwellers or entrench a reliance on private vehicle use for wealthier residents. Finally, social trends, including crime and violence, and differentiations across gender and other axes are comparable across cases. Violence underpins some of the land market practices in Accra and is widespread in relation to crime across the South African cases, with particular settlement types (often informal) more vulnerable, as discussed in Chapters 7 and 10. The social differences of African urban peripheries were detailed in Chapter 10, noting how gender, age, ethnicity, tenancy, etc. informed experiences of peripheries, but there is extensive scope here for further comparison across other African cities, presenting an area for future research asking in what ways peripheries are differentiated, by gender for example.

Arguably, many of these genetic comparisons of historical processes, drivers of urban change and the lived experiences of African peripheries are comparable across various other African countries and their urban peripheries. These include the influences of globalisation, state tactics which enable particular forms of investment, alongside capacity constraints, clientelism and absence, ongoing impacts of colonial histories of dispossession shaping current landownership, contestation and governance practices and challenges of housing affordability, poor-quality infrastructure, lack of economic opportunity and relative stuckness. In the body of the book, we emphasised case-specific empirical evidence of these processes rather than reporting on (and cross-referencing) evident comparisons across urban Africa more generally, but the introductory chapter does begin the process of explicit comparison beyond our country focus. More broadly, we see this book as contributing to a wider future conversation about comparisons across African urban peripheries.

This book also explicitly employed conceptually generative tactics. Through its choice of cases, where characteristics were partially shared, it sought to ‘generate and revise concepts’ (Robinson, 2016). Our aim was to work with the complexities and specificities of cases and to draw them into dialogue through which conceptual innovation could be marshalled. In drawing out the key generative aspects of our comparative research, we return now to the five logics of the peripheries and their potential contributions to the wider literature.

Living the peripheries: conceptual contributions and reflections

Our introductory chapter outlined five logics of African urban peripheries, namely speculative, vanguard, transitioning, auto-constructed and inherited. Here, we briefly reflect on the generative contributions of these concepts, exploring their insights and limitations in relation to broader debates. As we showed in the Introduction, there is a rapidly growing literature on the nature of suburbs, peri-urban areas, urban frontiers, extended urbanisation, edge spaces and margins. Indeed, one might ask what room there is for further conceptual generativity and analytical novelty on this topic. Yet the nature of urban peripheries in Africa is even more diverse, and evolving even more quickly, than the literature itself. While the earlier literature on peri-urbanisation was often empirically rooted in specific African contexts (e.g. Gough and Yankson, 2000; Mbiba and Huchzermeyer, 2002; Simon, 2004), much of the recent turn towards a focus on dynamics of extended urbanisation has tended towards high-level ‘universalising’ discussions about how peripheral growth reconfigures what we understand to be ‘urban’.¹ The experience of African urbanisation is still a minority element within these debates. Where it does enter into analysis of peripheral change – as it does in a number of important recent contributions that do examine the dynamism and diversity of African urban peripheries (e.g. Mabin et al., 2013; Sawyer, 2014; Mercer, 2017; Karaman et al., 2020; McGregor and Chatiza, 2019; Sawyer et al., 2020; Bloch, 2015; Bloch et al., 2022) – the focus is largely on the ways these places are produced rather than how they are lived.

As such, our contribution combines a focus on the logics of peripheral space production, reproduction and transformation with attention on the experience of these logics from a diverse range of residents. We argue that the peripheral logics we present help to characterise and account for the variety of conditions we find in our case studies on the edges of city-regions and the contradictions and tensions evident in residents’ narratives of their lives. We can, for example, understand why one resident’s account of a particular area like Tulu Dimtu might indicate rapid progress and optimism while another suggests stagnation and despair if we consider how the logic of the vanguard periphery also triggers displacement and land value increase that set in train logics of speculation, auto-construction and deepening dependence on the state (i.e. potential future ‘inherited peripheries’). The logics thus offer an intellectual platform to manage divergent and contradictory empirical material and bring nuance to an analysis of peripheral conditions through explicit attention to differentiation. Our recognition that logics overlap and are not singular is central to this claim. The relationships between logics and associated characteristics are also necessarily provisional, and our urban comparisons bear witness to this provisionality. Certain developments (vanguard for example) may come or be associated with the promise of services, but this doesn’t necessitate their high-quality provision or ongoing maintenance.

It is thus the texture of the qualitative empirical material examined in this book that evidences the generative aspects of our conceptual framing, and at times its limitations. These empirical details are productive in adding substance to the logics, showing how they play out in varying ways (an example being the contrasts in vanguard housing initiatives in Ethiopia versus South Africa). As this book has illustrated, the logics can variously be deployed to identify and account for drivers and forces shaping areas, motivations underlying initiatives and experiential dimensions/life in these areas. However, this needs to be accompanied by contextual analysis and depth of engagement for particular dimensions of the logics to become apparent. This confirms both the utility of our conceptual framing but also the need to populate the concepts in context-specific ways and to recognise the differentiating effects of key drivers of urban change, and how important intersectional realities are for those living the peripheries. Here, the interplay between conceptual logics and the nuances of the ‘everyday’ work to constantly challenge and test our framings. In this way we also show how different viewpoints on a situation (validating our methodological approach) can surface different logics, or aspects of them. For example, the household experience of a place driven by a vanguard logic may reflect a much more muted/incomplete form of vanguardism, and an inherited periphery for the state (which may be out of kilter with current planning directives) can, for some people living there, reflect a kind of cherished ‘personal inheritance’ where strong personal histories and social ties shape attachment to place.

The five logics are productive across different scales of analysis, and this is a further advantage empirically and theoretically building on their generative qualities. Their application can stretch across analyses of wider spatial plans, strategies, visions, to investigations within a locality or even a household, and can be used thematically across different cases but also within a particular locality. Questions of geography are central to the logics, and our book argues that size and location really do matter. Distance between a peripheral settlement and areas of opportunity can become so extreme that prospects of stitching in or fostering supporting economies remain unviable. This impacts both individual households and municipalities in terms of the relative location of the burden or the dividend. The book has shown the significance of location in terms of livelihoods and access to a range of services and opportunities. While critics have questioned the importance of location in view of the growing polycentricity of cities, people’s mobility across cities (Pieterse, 2019) and the way a broader set of factors affect poverty (Peberdy, 2017), our study of lived experience has underscored that location matters. Our conceptual logics reveal that as a result of different interventions and histories, there are peripheries within the peripheries, both in a geographic sense but also socio-politically. These relational experiences of the peripheries are exacerbated by their overall spatial peripheral location.

The book has also illustrated how different logics can intertwine and fuel or undermine one another. For example, speculation on the periphery can hook in vanguardism (as in the case of Protea Glen and Lufhereng in South Africa), and vanguardism can hang on the coat-tails of speculative logics, where the state stage-manages demand and private sector interests gain further momentum from subsequent vanguard interventions. Infrastructure delivery in an inherited or speculative periphery can attract or consolidate auto-construction, and a vanguard periphery, while predicated and delivered as a particular vision of complete formal housing, can become overlain with households’ own adaptations and transformations. This can evidence ‘reworked urbanism’ or ‘adapted urbanism’ or reveal how vanguardist logics are challenged by the decisions of individual householders (Charlton, 2018b), evidenced also in condominium residents’ choices to rent out their properties to tenants in Addis Ababa. This is an important contribution of our conceptual framing, where compared with wider peripheral urbanisation discussions, we note the ways in which residents adapt or respond after formal state housing delivery, rather than primarily emphasising people’s incremental delivery which is then subsequently responded to by the state.

When viewed in conversation with each other, our five logics offer the conceptual flexibility to trace change over time, unpacking the temporal dynamics of peripheral change noted in the previous section. The book includes case studies with long histories of occupation and also spaces with more recent developments, including one experiencing fundamental change through household removals and replacement investment. In older areas households’ histories of living there often lead to significant attachment, entrenching desires to remain in place despite the many disadvantages they have experienced in the location. Inherited peripheries can reflect both this personal attachment alongside the burden of living there. Newly created peripheries, sometimes inhabited by urban migrants, may over time build similar household ties. However, being partly composed of residents who have grown used to displacement and mobility, these areas also witness ongoing migration and movement elsewhere, including from one auto-constructed space, vanguard or speculative zone to another, as property values in one place rise beyond what they can afford or their tenuous foothold is overridden by alternative plans or catastrophic events. This kind of ‘location-hopping’ was especially evident among the tenants in formal housing units in Addis Ababa, where people would sometimes move from one condominium site to a very similar one elsewhere just because of the constantly changing differentials in rent. Entire settlements may also disappear as with two auto-constructed areas within our multinodal South Africa cases, where, subsequent to our research, households were relocated to state housing (or evicted) in one instance, and in the other the area was devastated by flooding.

Looking across all our case studies, we can see how areas produced under a vanguard logic can morph into an inherited periphery or an auto-constructed one, offering cautionary lessons about whether large state-driven peripheral investments will ultimately prove fruitful. Ongoing investment, including individual household investment in the home and state investments in infrastructure, can create dynamism. But forms of positive change can co-exist with stagnation, albeit economic, or maintenance stagnation as facilities are rendered unusable, and can co-exist with decline. This dynamism underscores a potential limitation of our logics, whose analytical value may well be superseded by other logics as changes over time unfold across different African urban peripheries. We argue that this is inevitable, even desirable, and is a key feature of generative comparison.

We recognise here that the book’s dominant focus on two countries, with a lesser focus on Ghana, can generate empirical and conceptual concerns about the generalisability of our analysis. Ethiopia and South Africa are certainly quite exceptional countries – albeit in very different ways – in terms of the state’s developmental role and its willingness to finance massive amounts of urban housing. Yet although these two states might be seen as unusually interventionist in this respect, by focusing on them we have been able to make a particular contribution to an understanding of vanguardist peripheries, their evolution over time and people’s experience of these places from a variety of perspectives. Our focus countries are also ones that have extensive informal settlements, an intense mix of state and private-owned property (particularly in Ethiopia), major foreign as well as diasporic and domestic investment projects and the substantial involvement of traditional authorities in peripheral urban governance (in South Africa, as well as Ghana). As such, between them they contain many of the major features that characterise peripheral urban development across the continent. This book has offered a long view of these places in contexts where poverty and unemployment are major concerns and where the growth of new economic centralities on the periphery may be limited, unstable or offer narrow sets of employment. It has also highlighted how the lack or failure of multisectoral integrated planning or implementation produces incomplete places, affecting the quality of place and access to a range of services and facilities. As economies and cities elsewhere in Africa grow, and with this we see resources channelled into urban peripheries in a range of ways, the experiences of Ethiopia, South Africa and Ghana are sure to resonate – despite important contextual differences.

Policy implications

The research informing this book highlights the dynamism and complexity of urban peripheries and the need for policy to understand and appropriately manage growth and change in these areas, rather than seeing them as residual spaces. Multisectoral frameworks focused on sustainability and inclusion are needed to bring together planning for environment, infrastructure, residential and economic development and to move beyond the divided, fragmented spaces often produced through large speculative and vanguardist projects. Responsiveness to the dynamics and needs of particular areas is also critical.

Much growth is occurring incrementally through logics of auto-constructed and transitioning peripheries – particularly as these are usually less regulated spaces where lower-cost land is available, although as the chapter on Ghana showed, speculative logics are increasingly evident. Managing these areas requires addressing overarching questions of land management, regularisation, finance and governance, and providing appropriate forms and levels of infrastructure and service delivery that can enhance often precarious lives.

While vanguardist and speculative projects may provide a better level of initial infrastructure than incremental development, our studies of existing peripheral settlements produced through a variety of logics show that the provision of infrastructure and services is incomplete and uneven, affecting peoples’ experiences. There is a need to improve conditions in existing areas, including in inherited spaces, through, for example, facilitating employment and economic activity accessible to people living there (such as public works schemes) and improving the conditions for everyday life through better physical and social infrastructure (including retail, recreational facilities, schools inter alia), as well as social programmes, all of which tend to be neglected in these areas. The prevalence of ‘boredom’, and its varied meanings, needs to be addressed, particularly given its consequences for mental and physical wellbeing. The difference that social and physical infrastructure make when well provided is evident in some of our cases. Improvements to transport provision locally – as well as major investment in roads – is also critical. Hence, a re-emphasis on ‘micro-infrastructure’ affecting everyday life, rather than simply large-scale and grand projects, is warranted. The research also suggests that micro-governance, in terms of how services are negotiated and accessed, needs to be better understood and addressed.

Given the legacy of inherited spaces in South Africa, and the historical and current significance of vanguard investments in both Ethiopia and South Africa, the research speaks particularly to contemporary emphases on creating large new cities and residential estates on the urban edge. The book highlights the interrelationship of structural economic problems and urban spatial inequalities. It shows that urban peripheral location can exacerbate socio-economic inequalities and marginalisation, although there is differentiation across places and social groups. Economic opportunities in several peripheral areas are limited, and in some cases declining, although there are levels of local entrepreneurship. Initial commitments to economic development may not be sustained or realised, or not to the extent anticipated. In areas of speculative private investment, or major state-led economic and infrastructure projects, some forms of employment and economic opportunities are being generated, but these may not be accessible to the poor due to skills mismatches, or they may be temporary. However, even places offering limited jobs may present other kinds of opportunities, such as access to housing and land availability. These dynamics can result in extensive reliance on commuting to access work, necessitating careful consideration of transport to and within urban peripheries. Hence, plans to develop large projects on the urban edge need to be approached with caution and with careful attention to the real prospects for creating local urban economies in specific places. Consideration also needs to be given to what sorts of jobs are created and for whom in these places. It suggests the need for greater attention to these issues in planning, across all scales including at the neighbourhood level, to recognise and enhance how home-based economic and social strategies emerge to help offset deficits in residential-led developments. Of course, local entrepreneurship and new forms of urbanism may emerge as places develop and change over time (Charman et al., 2020; Mosiane and Gotz, 2022). Planning for such areas needs to make space for and enable such economies, which are often informal, contrary to new city imagery. Attempts to stamp out or over-regulate informal economic activity, as seen to some extent in the Addis condominium sites, simply perpetuates the problems of people having to engage in long and expensive commutes to work elsewhere, reducing both the potential customer base and purchasing power within the peripheral sites and thereby stifling their potential economic dynamism.

A particular problem for mega-housing developments is the slow pace of growth in service provision and the long time horizons for investment in transport, facilities and other infrastructure. These delays limit the benefits of new housing developments for many years and raise additional questions about the sustainability and value of this kind of development or the way it is implemented. Problems related to a lack of effective, integrated planning in new settlements are sharply evident. In the Ethiopian context, the fragmented nature of planning and the failure to consider some of the fundamental impacts of building so much housing in these areas – which were freely admitted by many officials involved – suggest the need for much more coherent and multisectoral planning processes before sites are chosen and housing delivered. South Africa has stronger integrated planning policies, but in practice there is poor intersectoral coordination and often disjunctures between planning and implementation. Further, integrated development is often undermined by the failure to account for service and livelihoods needs and how these are fundamentally changed by being geographically peripheral. These arguments point to the need for broader conversations about planning, investment and the management of urban growth in African cities.

Finally, complex inter-governmental relationships and differences in the way governance occurs across boundaries and scales of government also affect the prospects for sustainable development. Significant variations exist between places on the urban periphery and even within areas located adjacent to each other. Some of these reflect the different ‘logics’ of periphery we outline. Thus, responses through policy formulation and the implementation of development plans need to be locally contextualised. There is no ‘one shoe fits all’ policy recommendation or practice guideline for the urban periphery, but it is clear in all cases that peripheral governance requires intensive inter-sectoral and inter-scalar coherence. This will often be resisted by those who benefit from the liminal, contested and blurry existing governance in the peripheries and necessitates concerted efforts on the part of central and regional authorities as well as meaningful inclusion of peripheral residents as active citizens.

Closing words

Our book has centred a lived experience approach to understanding African city peripheries in conversation with an analysis of drivers of urban change employing a genetic and generative comparative strategy. It has advanced five logics to characterise and interpret variation within African peripheries, which we believe hold substantial resonance beyond the cases studied here. We view these logics as potentially overlapping categories to be understood contextually in the light of histories of urban change and contemporary dynamics, cautioning against mechanistic application. Our methodological and conceptual approaches are explicitly intertwined, producing a fresh analytical perspective that has the potential for wider application, inviting further theorisation across other African peripheries and beyond.

In concluding the book we also offer some reflections on the growing enthusiasm for researching urban peripheries around the world and how this might be harnessed to push forward the debates with which this book is concerned. Amid increased interest in the many and varied forms of ‘extended urbanisation’ that characterise the contemporary global landscape, there lies a risk that a focus on the restless dynamics of capital and its entanglements with state authority obscure a focus on the experiences of peripheral life on the ground. Without denying the importance of the endless efforts to monetise land, and how these intersect with shifting paradigms of planning and a hunger for investment in large-scale infrastructure among many global actors, equally important stories are emerging with respect to the social lives of urban peripheries. As spaces of disconnection, aspiration, boredom and (perhaps above all) hope, these are locations in which the imaginaries of future urban places are being made. The more that we can explore and better understand the experience of everyday life in the urban periphery, and its evolution over time, the more likely that life itself can be centred in the making of urban futures.