Post-suburbia in continental Europe

Abstract

In recent decades, the transformation from parts of ‘suburbia’ into ‘post-suburbia’ has taken place in several city-regions across continental Europe. Partly the trends here look similar to those that took off in North America and the UK earlier: the rise of new office complexes, ‘urban entertainment centres’, malls, ‘airport cities’, and mixed livework areas at city edges and beyond. Partly also, however, the postsuburban developments in continental Europe are different. Generally post-suburbia in continental Europe is developing closer to and more interrelated with the traditional core cities of city-regions, and most often the developments are also of a more modest scale. That said, also within continental Europe we see striking differences between countries and city-regions. For example, there are significant differences between the ‘old’ and ʼnew’ EU member states, and also between countries with more and less national and regional planning influence. In our contribution we would like to add a continental European perspective to the theoretical debate on ‘post-suburbia’; highlight the main trends across the continent in recent decades and illustrate them with examples across the continent. In our contribution to this volume we focus mostly on post-suburbia as new forms of settlement space and/or the functional transformation of places formerly known as suburbia. We will occasionally also pay attention to other issues related to the post-suburbia debate such as administrative organization, governance and place identity, but refer to other contributions to this volume for more detailed accounts on these issues.