Abstract:  The peri-urban remains a slippery category, widely used to describe spaces at the edges of cities yet rarely pinned down in ways that enable meaningful readings across contexts. This article argues that both literature and methods pertaining to peri-urban spaces require frameworks capable of holding two positions in tension: an embedded, place-based lens that centres on-the-ground narratives and experiences, and a comparative approach that sustains the peri-urban as an umbrella term across contexts. Tracing the scholarship of peri-urbanisation through notions of the hinterland and “hyperbuilding,” the article examines two state-planned industrial enclaves at the rural/urban margins of Chennai, India and Hsinchu City, Taiwan, drawn into comparative focus as interconnected nodes within global high-tech supply chains, exemplifying a mode of peri-urbanisation characterised by the circumvention of everyday urban realities and sustained by exceptional governance. Drawing from lens-based methodologies that centre walking and sensorial engagement, this article proposes participatory 3D scanning (photogrammetry) as a method to engage the transformations occurring at this interface of the ordinary and the exceptional, the local and the planetary. This method is operationalised via two workshops, revealing a perceived and comparative sense of inexorability across participant outputs. The article concludes by detailing the aggregation of workshop outputs onto a web-based platform (Techno-Urban Atlas), reflecting upon the circulation of digital objects to extend the epistemological scope of peri-urban transformations and generate new opportunities for user-led comparison.

Keywords:  3D scanning; comparative urbanism; hinterlands; India; participatory methods; peri-urban; photogrammetry; Taiwan

Published:   24 September 2026

Issue:   Vol 11 (2026): The Urban Canvas: Spatial Computing in Planning, Analysing, and Representing the Cityscape (In Progress)