At the edges of cities, where asphalt slowly absorbs the earth, stretch territories built for circulation and consumption. Peripheral retail zones: functional, standardized spaces, raised according to the visual charters of their brands, designed to be crossed rather than inhabited. At night the signs light up, the façades stage themselves. These spaces, which seem unremarkable by day, reveal their true nature: devices of seduction, built to draw the eye and capture attention.
Horizon 99 takes its name from a proven marketing tactic, the psychological price. Set at “.99” rather than the round figure above it, to create the illusion of a gap where none exists, the sense of a bargain. These landscapes work the same way. They seem unremarkable, even transparent. Yet they are one of the projections of our relation to space, to value, to the norm, the visible fragment of a consumer system that conceived and organized space in order to sell.
These spaces belong to what the anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-places.” Spaces of transit, interchangeable, stripped of historical or affective anchorage. But these non-places are not merely neutral. They are the product of a precise economic intention, of a territorial logic meant to redistribute uses, fracture town centers, make the car a condition of access, and swallow thousands of hectares of land in the name of volume and profit. The artificialization of the soil this model produces is its most lasting mark. Technically, these surfaces can be returned to the earth, but the cost and inertia of the system make that return unlikely at the scale on which it was produced. What discount retail has inscribed in the territory, it does not undo.
Begun in 2012, this project sets out to look slowly at what we cross without seeing, not to deliver a verdict but to reveal its logic. Since then, a discourse of transformation has taken hold. A national plan has been driving, since 2023, the conversion of these zones, new uses, more mixed use, a measure of renaturation. These announcements alter the narrative before the territory. They perhaps replay the very gesture these places have always performed: producing the image of a change where the model persists.
Pierre-Romain Guedj is a French photographer, born in 1992. Trained in photography and later in geomatics & urban planning, his work sits at the intersection of image-making and territorial analysis.
Having grown up around peripheral and industrial spaces, his relationship to them is as much one of familiarity as it is of inquiry. Through a slow and exacting practice, he photographs the territory produced by economic and political logics, not as a distant observer, but as someone for whom these spaces have always been part of the landscape of everyday life.
His long-term projects trace a personal geography of the places contemporary societies build but rarely stop to look at, questioning the mutations that transform our relationship to space and identity.
© Text and pictures by Pierre-Romain Guedj
