Urban motorways as spaces of possibility: Urban interstices and everyday practices around a motorway in Sardinia

Abstract

In this article, I explore the hypothesis that urban interstices around urban motorways could be intended as spaces of creative, political and performative possibilities not responding to planning and market logic. Urban interstices are context-dependent spaces in a minoritarian position compared to more powerful spaces. Their relationship with planning and investments is ambiguous, because they are by-products of urban processes but temporarily neglected spaces. This leads to a certain degree of freedom in the experimentation of different uses and dynamics. Grounding in Gibson-Graham’s politics of possibility, I provide a re-reading of urban motorways as spaces of possibility where undisciplined spatial forms and dynamics are made visible, conceivable and therefore possible. With an ethnographic approach, I explored the daily practices taking place in the interstices of the urban motorway SS 554, which encircles the city of Cagliari, in Sardinia. I provide an understanding of the daily practices of its inhabitants as a form of non-conflictual everyday politics, intended as a practice of producing urban space always-in-the-making. By observing daily life in urban interstices, I highlight the political possibilities that infrastructure entails and suggest an overcoming of the technocratic and normative gaze usually adopted in work on urban motorways. These urban interstices appear to be spaces of possibility, where the discarded pieces of urban processes are appropriated by inhabitants to produce a different urbanity.