Zwischenstadt

Definition

Zwischenstadt — Sieverts's "in between city" (or "between-city"; Cities Without Cities, 2003) — names "those spaces of the city that cannot easily be characterized in the spatial language of concentric rings" (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015, p. 569, glossing Sieverts). The term is the third of the article's three challenge-sources to the classical suburban frame (with Dear's Los Angeles school and Simone's global-South urbanism), and it is the one that operates at the level of spatial description itself: the Zwischenstadt is neither city nor countryside, neither centre nor periphery, but the dispersed, infrastructural, everywhere-and-nowhere urbanized landscape that the classical analytic vocabulary (ring, core, commuter belt) cannot name. Its English cousin in the same article is the "in-between" of the (sub)urban region: "The uncertainty and fuzziness of its boundaries already reflect some of the ambiguities of suburbia and of the regional clusters that are emerging in practice" (p. 570).

In the wiki's concept-space, Zwischenstadt sits between the suburban cluster (it is the form that forces suburbanism to be thought) and the terrain vague cluster: both name neglected, uncharacterizable space — but the terrain vague is the void within the city awaiting reprogramming, while the Zwischenstadt is the city itself when the city/country code fails.

The Keil register (2015). The cluster's third source adds the concept's morphological content and its cartographic limit. The dispersed city De Meyer et al. describe is "multi-focus, discontinuous, variably dense, and multi-centred… not oriented towards the traditional core" (quoted p. 582), and its functional logic has been disentangled from density: "In many cases, the outskirts of metropolitan areas have adopted almost all the characteristics of the classic city and adapted them to a lower density" (quoted p. 584). The region is "punctured by edge cities and technoburbs" (Sieverts, Garreau, cited p. 584) — its morphology read at regional scale "evinces more similarities with the concept of 'megalopolis' as introduced by the French geographer Jean Gottmann" (De Meyer, quoted p. 590). Crucially for the concept's cartographic edge: "As this new multi-density, multi-function urban region has emerged over the last generation, it has consistently defied systematic analytical, cartographic representation and planning intervention" (De Meyer, quoted p. 584) — the Zwischenstadt as what the planning vocabulary cannot draw.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the first ingest of the suburbanism batch; deepened at the Keil ingest.

Key Thinkers

• Thomas Sieverts (not yet paged — see log) — the concept's originator: Cities Without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (2003)
• cochrane-allan, colenutt-bob, field-martin — the concept's English-clip transmitters: the Zwischenstadt as one of the three challenge-sources to the classical suburban frame

Related Concepts

• post-suburbia — the Anglophone sibling: the "post-suburban moment" beside the German Zwischenstadt
• suburbanism — the parent claim the Zwischenstadt supports: suburbs as defining urbanism
• terrain-vague — the wiki's existing neglected-space concept: void within the city vs city-as-between
• urban-sprawl — the moralized name for much of what the Zwischenstadt describes without condemning
• non-places — the experiential overlap: both name spaces without the classical place-qualities, though the Zwischenstadt is lived and inhabited where the non-place is traversed
• urbanism — the discipline whose spatial language (rings, cores) the Zwischenstadt outgrows

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the concept introduced as one of three contemporary challenge-sources: "a third draws attention to the Zwischenstadt (or 'in between city'), those spaces of the city that cannot easily be characterized in the spatial language of concentric rings (Sieverts, 2003)" (p. 569)
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the morphological register: the multi-focus, discontinuous, variably dense, multi-centred city (p. 582); the outskirts adopting "almost all the characteristics of the classic city… adapted to a lower density" (p. 584); edge cities and technoburbs; Gottmann's megalopolis (p. 590); the defied cartographic representation (p. 584)

Open Questions

• The 2015 article cites the Zwischenstadt but does not use it — its own region is "(sub)urban" rather than "in between." Is the Zwischenstadt the better name for the Greater South East's condition, or does the English case (containment, greenbelt, home-ownership democracy) need its own vocabulary?
• What is the Zwischenstadt's interior? Sieverts's scale is the landscape and the fragment; the wiki's clusters are interior-centric. Does the between-city have rooms?
• How does the Zwischenstadt relate to terrain-vague and non-places as a taxonomy of neglected urban space — three concepts for the same void, or three distinct conditions (between-city, void-within-city, transit-space)?