A Scenographic Look at the Peripheries

Accompanying the strong growth of non-dense urban territories, road networks were mainly designed within a functionalist framework. However, the infrastructural legacy of automobile mobility now has to deal with a crisis that is not only social, economic, and ecological, but also symbolic and semantic. This chapter proposes an alternative to the functionalist approach of road design: studying the spatial and visual dimensions of road interfaces reveals part of their negative impact on the quality of urban life as well as the improvement potential contained in this new urban vocabulary.