Fringe Belts and the Recycling of Urban Land: An Academic Concept and Planning Practice

It has been well established by urban morphologists that fringe-belt development is an integral part of the historico-geographical development of cities, but such development has attracted little attention from planners. Despite the physical distinctiveness of Birmingham's Edwardian fringe belt, decisionmaking about its development is largely site-by-site. Its survival as a concentric zone with a high incidence of green space partly reflects the fact that the character and occupation of the individual sites of which it is composed have become deeply rooted in the mental maps of those able to influence change. Awareness of the fringe belt as an entity is rare: few landowners, developers, or planners see individual sites as integrated parts of the historical and ecological development of the city as a whole. Initially, pressure to redevelop fringe-belt plots has come largely from landowners. The proposed changes are often at variance with the predilections of local planners. Planners have a sectional perception, strongly related to the land use of cities. For developers, an interest in sites other than the one to which their planning application relates is almost entirely limited to the effects that adjacent sites might have on the viability of their proposal. The integrative quality of the fringe-belt concept is an important aspect of its potential as a citywide planning construct.