Palermo Metro-Peripheries: The Role of Peripheries in a Metropolitan Perspective

The deep change in functional, political, and symbolic relations between core and peripheries inEuropean metropolitan dynamics has blurred the current categories of “periphery” and “core”.The periphery is no longer a homogeneous reality, but a dynamic and fragmented urban landscape.The institution of new territorial bodies in Italy, with the metropolitan cities and new formsof institutional collaboration between territorial bodies, is a new political framework that callsfor new solutions in regional policy-making in order to overcome the radial (core-centric) urbanmodel: peripheries are not longer satellites of core cities' development but realities that, in a widerview, have a new spatial and relational centrality in a metropolitan perspective. The challenges ofmetro-peripheries can only be successful if all tiers of planning and decision-making are willingand committed to cooperate in strategic development processes: a “multilayered” governance,as balanced combination of bottom-up and top down processes, acting at micro/meso andmacro scales.