Peripheral centrality or resource periphery?

The recent surge in large-scale green technology projects and associated built infrastructure reflects the European Union’s commitment to climate neutrality and diversified supply chains in a post-COVID landscape. This shift has triggered significant investment in previously marginalised regions across Europe, including Eastern Germany. According to the overarching narratives of local policymakers and business leaders, the new investments are poised to transform the region into a technological frontier, generating new employment, value creation, infrastructure, and transnational connectivity within the broader context of the green transition.

This book chapter, however, questions the common assumption that green technology investments inherently generate new centralities, thereby catalysing the development of ‘left-behind’ areas. Instead, it reveals that transnational capital flows and dynamics of peripheralisation are deeply intertwined, perpetuating the chronic marginalisation of certain regions as global ‘resource peripheries’. The chapter appears in the volume “Peripheral Centralities: Instances of Anticipatory Urbanism”, which explores the centrality of urban peripheries in all their variety with a view to reworking urban, architectural, design, planning, infrastructural, sociological, ecological, and geographical theory ‘from the outside in’.