Thriving at the Edge
Abstract
This chapter takes aim at the current urban-age consensus and demonstrates how the orthodox perception of creativity as an urban prerogative has stifled our ability to imagine how creativity unfolds in peripheral contexts. Rather than reducing peripheries to the amorphous residual terrain beyond the city limits whose destiny is sealed by the profound lack of urban virtues, we present socio-material, socio-cultural and political-economic assets of peripherality. By drawing on a wide range of peripheral contexts – from artists in Finnish Lapland to spacefarers in New Zealand – the chapter elucidates how smallness and dispersion, diversities and hostility, and the absence of power and isolation are leveraged for creativity and innovation.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Cultural Industries and Urban Development
Geographies of human-animal interactions
Urban Planning and Governance
Publication details
- Journal / source
- The Routledge Handbook of Peripheries in European Studies
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Pages
- 103–126
- Publication date
- 10 February 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Book chapter