Beyond the Urban Edge · ScalarArchitecture · Anto Lloveras · LAPIEZA-LAB · 2026

The city does not end where a planning map changes colour. Water, labour, energy, food, waste, transport and ecological processes cross administrative boundaries long before they become visible as territorial questions. The urban periphery is therefore not simply a diluted version of the centre or a zone waiting to become city. It is a place where the relations that support urban life often become more explicit: reservoirs, logistics platforms, agricultural land, floodplains, forests, industrial corridors and governance systems intersect without belonging to a single urban image. Evidence gathered on a street or in a neighbourhood cannot be enlarged mechanically to explain these processes. A pedestrian route may reveal access and spatial continuity; it cannot by itself establish the functioning of a watershed or the distribution of regional material flows. ScalarArchitecture treats the passage from city to periphery, landscape and region as a change in evidential conditions, not just in cartographic extent. Different scales require different observations: field transects, territorial sections, infrastructure histories, ecological accounts, institutional records and appropriately bounded situated encounters. Architectural and landscape work such as El Palmeral, Skog Landart and Husøy Arena provides a vocabulary of spatial relations, but the broader argument is methodological. To extend an urban claim beyond the built edge, the researcher must specify which relations persist, which emerge only at territorial scale and which can no longer be inferred from local observation. The landscape is not the empty background of the city; it is part of the material and political system through which the city exists.