Centralities in the city border: a method to identify strategic urban-rural interventions

Abstract

City borders perform an essential role in connecting towns and their surroundings. Being more a fuzzy area than a thin line, these urban borders gather together residential, tertiary and infrastructural uses, places awaiting development, agricultural fields, brown-field sites, abandoned areas etc. all named as ‘b-sites’. Within this context, we propose a method to identify places for strategic urban-rural interventions based on the assessment and identification of centralities in the urban-rural transition. Multiple centrality assessment is here presented as an innovative application considering both urban streets and rural road networks as a mixed network with identified central nodes. This innovative method has been tested in the city of Granada (Spain) allowing us to identify high centrality ‘b-sites’ where landscape project design and, urban-rural interventions could contribute to creating urban-rural transition continuity.