In-between. (Sub)urbanisation from the outside-in and the generative role of borders

Thomas Sieverts in his masterpiece Cities Without Cities (Zwischenstadt) offers a lucid glimpse into the complexity of post-urbanised landscapes. Specific attention is given to the societal relationships with nature. Urban planning’s singular trust in the creative potential of the built environment is replaced by a free-falling entry into the world of urban - nature dialectics. This contribution digs into the word in-between to trouble the traditional urban/rural and society/nature distinctions as spatial, conceptual, and disciplinary boundaries. The current debate on Urban Political Ecology (UPE), not of the city but of urbanization, offers some thoughts to work across traditional disciplinary divisions and retheorize the city as a product of metabolic processes of socionatural transformation in an era of planetary urbanisation.