Going up the Country: Internationalization and Urbanization on Frankfurt's Northern Fringe

Abstract

In this paper the current period of urbanization, which to a higher degree than ever before blurs conventional notions of core and periphery, is explored. Cities today appear as multicentered, nodal, flexible, and global. These trends are examined in the case of Frankfurt, with reference to the concepts developed by world city theory, regulation theory, and from the discourse on space and restructuring. Frankfurt presently faces two kinds of growth and two discourses on growth. First, the expansion of the citadel of the world city and, second, the expansion of world-city-related growth into the periphery. Central and peripheral growth are linked in an oscillating movement of mutually reinforcing dynamics. Examples of peripheral urbanization are presented, with emphasis on the specific role of the airport as a new node of development. In this paper the articulation of these growth dynamics with the local political space of the northern fringe of the municipality of Frankfurt, where rapid restructuring of the urban landscape is under way, is examined. It is argued that the new dynamics of growth which affects the urban periphery in an unprecedented way calls for a new regional mode of regulation.