Dr Lucia Cerrada Morato

The world is rapidly suburbanizing, with more than 85% of the European population expected to be living in cities’ peripheries by 2050. While mainstream urban studies have portrayed territories beyond city centres in a financial, environmental, and social crisis; recent publications suggest the urbanized periphery offers spatial and socio-technical opportunities for its transformation into an environmentally sustainable and socially just place. My research explores the role of alternative forms of service provision in the urbanized periphery to achieve a postgrowth future. This work builds on the extensive fieldwork research I undertook as part of my PhD in the periphery of a medium sized city in Spain and seeks to better analyse their findings and expand it with further limited research in a second city. The aim of this Fellowship is therefore to (a) explore how the suburban crises is experienced by residents and other stakeholders involved in the provision and production of infrastructures, (b) to identify the bottom-up and top-down processes of transformation across models of supply; and (c) to assess the unequal socio-economic impacts these might have across communities and peripheral areas.