Is the terrain still vague? Reconsidering indeterminate spaces

Abstract

Wastelands, urban voids, interstices: especially since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of terminologies projected on (supposedly) empty urban spaces by designers, scholars, and artists. These discussions emerged as responses to landscapes of deindustrialization, increasing sensitivity to the impacts of infrastructures on the urban fabric, the declining currency of modernist planning and a shift towards piecemeal regeneration and aestheticization of ‘left-over’ spaces. A key text typifying this fixation, offering an umbrella term for these spaces, was the Terrain Vague by architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales. His theorization of spatial indeterminacy, borrowing concepts from photography, was driven by ambivalence towards designers’ approaches to the urban residuum. We attempt to reterritorialize de Solà-Morales’ critique within the context it responded to, the ‘Barcelona Model’ of design-led regeneration. With terrains vague remaining focal points in urbanist discourse, there is increasing acknowledgement that urban spaces are rarely devoid of social activity, value, or meaning. Nevertheless, planners, architects, and policymakers continue to project voidness onto these spaces to justify their reconfiguration and revalorization. We argue that the discourse on emptiness has lost much of its novelty–especially when divorced from the political economic processes that create them–and suggest ways to move beyond this impasse.