The emerging in-between: Navigating qualitative urban transitions and patterns alongside ring roads

This dissertation examines the transitional zones to argue that areas crossed by ring roads become potential expansions for city structure, although possibly originally restricted. Ring roads and their adjacent areas are products of standardised hierarchical models that define critical infrastructural boundary, and they are currently subject to massive transformation processes. Due to regional restructuring agendas, ring roads and areas alongside them are emerging as in-between zones caught in contradictory inertial forces and forming critical zones of transitions and interfaces around city centres. Although they can encapsulate the absolute connotation of sprawling hierarchical space, ring roads and areas alongside them can also serve to assimilate discussions on emergence and transitions that change the urban structure towards open trans-scalar spatial organisation. Therefore, this thesis examines how changing spatial configurations and functionality are refashioned at this urban boundary under regional restructuring agendas, mechanisms of rescaling, dynamic redistribution, and correlation.

To ensure that the contemporary notions of planning and growth are in conjunction with spatial reality, I have adopted an exploratory and empirical qualitative approach to answer the main question: how does transition towards transscalar configuration and functionality replace areal hierarchies? To answer this question, I have defined five variables: the structural dimension of the ring road, locational factor and interurban correlations, morphology and spatial density, continuity and movement patterns, and spatial interaction and social exchange. Mapping these variables features the significance of this relatively microscale level of analysis for understanding the emerging in-between zones at the regional level. These variables form the basis for mapping and analysing specific outcomes of spatial transition. With the help of them, I have explained the dissolution of certain types of urban boundaries associated with ring roads and the emergence of their immediate proximal areas as in-between and interurban transitioning zones. The thesis examines four urban regions from two main contexts: Greater Amman and Kuwait from the Middle East, and Oslo and Greater Helsinki from the Nordic countries. Using case study analysis, this dissertation probes evolving spatial, rather than technical, roles of ring roads in contemporary urban development, and it navigates the transitions of the dissipative spatial structures alongside them. This includes spatial formations, emerging patterns, and relative and relational qualities for identifying challenges, and the potential and embedded values of these localities. In addition, I have discussed, based on the findings from the case studies, how these areas are subsumed within broader processes of urban transition and regional restructuring.

There is an axis of correlation through which ring roads and areas alongside them interact and relate on different scales, thereby enabling spatial transitions to occur. Utilising the qualitative interpretations presented in the five research articles, the results of this thesis signify the responsiveness levels of urban systems that handle spatial transitions under varying conditions. The analysis of the case studies reveals that, on the one hand, standardised hierarchical urban models and the non-linear relationship between spatial processes and products have produced ambivalent and vulnerable interurban structures and heterogenous absolute, relative, and relational patterns. The initial spatial layer is influenced by the interstitial character of the ring road. Further, the studied areas unfold emerging uneven distribution of infrastructures and investments that, along with the barrier effect of the ring road, continue to interrupt the trans-scalar organization and its centrifugal flow.

On the other hand, mapping changes in urban governance in these case studies highlights that the studied interurban structures have formed new configurations of non-hierarchical spatial relationships at different levels. The current regional restructuring allows a new relational organisation of space based on network alignment and the customisation of existing infrastructure, thereby modifying the absolute, relative, and relational characters of urban boundaries. Despite their interstitiality, in-betweenness, fragmentation, and discontinuity, the findings reveal the utilisation of different strategies and topological customisations to promote new attractiveness and centrality indicators, interdependencies, and improved accessibility. The analysis illustrates that the shift beyond repetitive and deterministic practices of standardised hierarchical modules towards creative and responsive strategies can help promote new relative and relational dimensions to support transscalar spatial transitions.