Terrain Vague Research Articles

Visual Representations of Abandoned Industrial Spaces in Tourist Photos

A few decades ago, an enthusiastic researcher would have found relatively few data to analyze, looking for such information about the ruins of modernity as the structural consequences caused by rapid cycles of industrialization and desolation, development and depopulation, conflict and reconciliation. However, conducting the same search today reveals an extraordinary increase in academic and public interest in the ruins of the recent past and the associated abandoned places. The authors of this article join in the discussion and explore the images of deindustrialization posted and distributed in the online communities among abandoned sites enthusiasts. The aim of the research is to form an idea of “everyday life policy” about the abandoned industrial facilities popularized by amateur photographers. “Everyday life policy” is expressed through the signifying and conceptualizing the abandoned and ruined places when putting them in a close-up. The authors rely on the ideas of the architect and historian I. de Sola-Morales, who calls the places left by people “terrain vague”. Photographic images of the terrain vague spaces play an important role in conceptualizing them. In order to understand what meanings exactly shaped the public policy, the authors use the ethnographic method of immersion in the online VKontakte/Telegram communities of abandoned sites enthusiasts to discover the recurring iconographic elements of the derelict places. Deindustrialization in photographs is reflected through 1) loss of human; 2) violence of vegetation or nature agency; 3) artifacts and texts of the past or material objects agency. The authors discuss the similarities of the images taken by amateur photographers and those media clichés found in popular movies and video games. Photographs are a way of explaining space and spatial experience. Furthermore, like any other work of art, a photo conveys not only and not so much the actual characteristics of the depicted objects, thanks to which we can form an idea about them (in this case, about space), but also effects and experiences. Thus, a photograph becomes a tool that helps us form value judgments about the places we have seen.

Max Porter’s ruderalism, or what nature is now

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to Max Porter’s portrayal of the ruderal margins of our human lifeworld as the dominant landscape of the Anthropocene. My analysis reaches beyond conceptions of the ruderal as a liminal terrain vague, or ‘edgelands’, that constitutes a hybrid ‘third space’ between the cultural zone of urban or suburban settlements, on the one hand, and nature as incorporated by the countryside, or ‘the wilderness’, on the other. The article seeks to advance Environmental Humanities research by reading the ruderal as emblematic of the contemporary zeitgeist in a time of escalating environmental despoliation. In the Anthropocene the ruderal usurps ‘nature’ and emerges as culture’s only enduring exteriority, an exteriority that grows in unpredictability and formidableness in direct proportion to the manifold anthropogenic disturbances inflicted upon it. The article traces Porter’s progressively ruderalist aesthetics from Lanny (2019) to Shy (2023) as he lets go of traditional 'nature' in order to find new ways of relating to what nature has become in the Anthropocene, what nature is now. What this means for the novel is that it must cease as a humans-only monologue and recalibrate its aesthetic orientation from exclusive anthropocentric representation to more-than-human resonance and a ruderalist ecosemiotic rapport.

The Playground of the Third Landscape:

This article defines a prospective playful-urban study across the following concepts: a) Third Landscape by Clement and Terrain Vague by Sola-Morales, from landscape and architecture. b) The practices of Junk Playgrounds conceptualized through play studies. c) The idea of playful animal experience from a non-speciesist perspective that comes from animal studies. With all this, a specific work proposal on the playground in unattended urban environments is conceptually defined, which joins the multispecies agenda and helps to enrich the institutional programs from which the rewilding of cities is being regulated. Finally, the article defines the potential that this proposal contains in a specific Third Landscape in the city of Alcalá de Henares, which allows the evaluation of the enunciated practice.

Bridging Global Policy-making and Local Intensive Developments in the Urban Voids of a Megacity: Insights from Bangkok

Megacities and rapidly urbanizing territories are contemporary issues which have now reached international attention and institutional recognition. Megacities and rapidly urbanizing territories in Southeast Asia especially are subject to both intensive and extensive patterns of growth that are reflected by the dynamics of densification in consolidated urban areas and loss of agricultural lands due to development in peri-urban areas. The New Urban Agenda and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an international shared understanding of policies and knowledge to tackle, among other issues, loss of agricultural land, general land use management, segregation and inequalities within megacities and rapidly urbanizing regions. However, oftentimes, this international level of policy-making loses its strength when the urban issues are scaled down to local applications. Influenced by the presence of local private interests and global economic forces, the local urban processes of intensive and extensive growth appear to be detached from the general international policy framework and affected by site-specific dynamics. This article examines the level of this separation in Bangkok, especially in regards to a specific kind of the aforementioned intensive growth at the metropolitan scale, the development of the urban voids - terrain vague. I discuss how this separation is more evident in those empty, underused, and abandoned areas where possible intensive developments could happen. Furthermore, I evaluate this separation by reflecting on how it can affect the upcoming future of the megacity of Bangkok.

About the published content on each section

About the published content on each section

Visual Essays on Urbanity: A Photographic Journey through Architectural Transformations

'The Visual Spaces of Change' (VSC) section emphasises the role of photography and various visual representation methods as pivotal in researching, documenting, and analysing the transformational aspects of architecture, urbanity, and territorial landscapes. This section acknowledges the intricate link between societal transformations and alterations in the spaces we inhabit, with recent historical events underscoring the swiftness of these spatial changes. The radical nature of these transformations has necessitated a consistent and urgent documentation of the impermanent nature of places. Places, inherently uncertain, are captured visually to preserve and understand their essence. Contemporary societal shifts, such as urban gentrification or health-related crises, have brought about significant changes in life patterns, leading to the creation of photographs that were once unimaginable. The VSC resides here, in documentary artistic projects that explore the expanded field of architecture, from its tangible manifestation to the experiences it fosters. It investigates various scales, new spatial configurations, architectural vernaculars, and urban vistas, while also probing into the discursive spaces that intersect with larger frameworks, including socio-cultural, political, historical, and technical realms.
 By treating images as a form of visual language that is disseminated and interpreted across different global points[1], this section extends its dialogue. It opens up to incorporate diverse cultural viewpoints from various regions, places, and countries, using the specificities of each location to enhance our understanding of society and the territorial landscape. The strategy's objective is to promote the use of images in constructing artistic projects that offer critical reflections on the transformation of architecture and urban landscapes, influenced by the diverse ways they are perceived and experienced. Ultimately, the section seeks to utilise the contemporary significance of imagery, particularly photography, as a means to broaden knowledge. Photography is esteemed as a prime medium for interpreting architecture and for crafting imaginative narratives, navigating between reality and fiction, replication and alteration, and the amalgamation of analogue and digital visual forms, thus traversing various disciplines and blurring artistic demarcations.
 The section commences with James Smith's visual essay "Temporal Dislocation", which explores the contrasting interplay between destruction and regeneration in our interactions with landscapes. Smith's photographic series highlights the recurring patterns of the natural world following human interference, driven by a profound phenomenological perspective. The series bridges the intentional composition by the photographer and the incidental engagement of the viewer with these reconfigured landscapes, positioning the photograph as a subtle form of communication that invites reevaluation of the common and omnipresent.
 "Urban Wilderness: A Journey through Lisbon Terrain Vague" by Lorenzo Iannizzotto focuses on the piecemeal and indeterminate nature of the so-called "Terrain Vague" or "Urban Voids" in Lisbon. Iannizzotto employs photography as a means to explore and articulate these spaces, presenting them in a fragmented and sporadic fashion that honours their intrinsic features. His work uncovers the latent charm of these spaces, highlighting their considerable potential for urban development.

Urban Wilderness

The new urban condition has generated ambiguous spaces within it: Terrain Vague or Urban Voids are spaces within the city, nameless and without clear boundaries, difficult to define. They are unpaved and vegetated spaces that are neither public spaces, nor gardens, nor agricultural fields, lying in a state of abandonment, suspension, and invisibility. With no specific function and temporarily outside the logic of the market, these spaces are appropriated and used daily by people and nature.
 Indeed, they eschew traditional cartographic representation, where they are often represented as mere white spaces, or spaces with future destinations. For this reason, walking as a common action becomes the fundamental tool for approaching, getting to know, and studying these spaces, while photography and other visual media become not only a means of representation, but also of studying and understanding the dynamic reality of these spaces and the different realities that inhabit them.
 With this visual essay, I do not aim to provide an unambiguous representation or definition of these spaces, far from it. Going along with the fragmentary and uncertain nature of these places, I have used photography as a means of urban research to understand and describe these places, and as a personal travelogue within these spaces, as if to take notes. Having chosen Lisbon as the privileged terrain of my research, this visual essay has the sole purpose of trying to represent these spaces in a disorderly and fragmentary way, following their nature, and in doing so, trying to unveil a hidden beauty and reveal their enormous potential for the city.

Typology of terrain vague and emergence mechanisms in post-communist, post-industrial small and medium-sized towns in Slovakia: Case study of Humenné, Strážske and Vranov and Topľou

Abstract There have been many problems associated with underutilized areas in towns, although they also offer significant potential for urban renewal, especially in post-communist, post-socialist countries, where a series of key historical events has caused socio-economic and political changes leading to urban decay. The underlying feature of unused areas is their apparent abandonment, absence of use, lack of identity but high potential. However, not all unused areas should be labelled as brownfields; therefore, we studied the terms commonly used to describe underutilized areas. We chose the term terrain vague to map and describe all apparently empty but still intriguing spaces in our model towns of Humenné, Strážske and Vranov and Topľou, in eastern Slovakia. Our paper aims to create a typology of terrain vague to better understand its manifestation in our conditions. It also aims to determine the causes that led to its emergence or as we call it the emergence mechanisms, in the context of post-industrial small and middle-sized towns in Slovakia. We combined field survey and desktop analysis methods to map terrain vague based on set criteria. We evaluated mapped terrain vague and, using the data, created a typology of terrain vague consisting of nine types and identified three key emergence mechanisms and their subcategories. We based them on commonly used terms that fit within the specific context of our model towns. By using the new typology and emergence mechanism, we can identify patterns running along towns with similar backgrounds that result in similar problems and develop solutions accordingly. Results of our research could be generalized and serve as a basis for future research aimed at finding strategies for revitalizing terrain vague in shrinking post-industrial towns facing different problems than prosperous cities.

Berlin's queer archipelago: Landscape, sexuality, and nightlife

AbstractThe metaphor of the archipelago has informed ideas about Berlin's post‐war and post‐wall fractured urban landscape as well as recent work on sexual minorities in the city. In the context of Berlin's landscape, the image refers to green islands of spontaneous vegetation on sites left behind by bomb damage and border infrastructure, while in scholarship on sexuality, it suggests a more dispersed distribution of minority nightlife than in the traditional focus on the gayborhood. The two meanings come together in many of Berlin's electronic dance music clubs, which are located in overgrown voids—or Brachen in German—and form a queer archipelago outside the heteronormative grid. Drawing on insights from queer and ruderal ecology, as well as some of the memory literature from the early German reunification era, this paper explores these club islands in relation to the landscape term terrain vague. By focusing on two sites in the former East Berlin borough of Friedrichshain—Wriezener Park, next to the city's most famous club Berghain, and the Brache‐turned‐dance club ://about blank—Berlin's current status as a global centre for queer club culture is understood through the lens of its unusual urban landscape and spectral ecologies.

Review: Cinque viaggi (1990–98), by Guido Guidi

Review: <i>Cinque viaggi (1990–98)</i>, by Guido Guidi

Margins are central: identity and indigenous resistance to colonial globalization in Guam

ABSTRACT Early modern colonial globalization was the first producer of marginality and cultural erasure on a world scale. The CHamorus of Guam and Marianas know this well since they were the first Pacific islanders to be turned into indigenous ‘others’ by European colonial powers. In a certain sense, investigating Guam is like investigating a huge terrain vague, or an interstice or in-between space that exists outside the cultural, social, and economic dynamics acknowledged by the Global North. However, it is within these margins where vibrant resistance to global cultural standardization settles and happens, as CHamorus also know. In this article, we will focus on CHamoru cultural resilience at lånchos (rural properties outside cities and villages), at reducciones (villages or towns where CHamorus were forcibly nucleated in the seventeenth century), and at the current use of colonial ‘ruins’ to promote indigenous cultural enhancement and community wellbeing.

Spaces of Absence in the European City: Stitching Urban Infrastructure to Contemporary Collective Life

This paper examines spaces in the European City that are often defined as peripheral, empty and absent. “Spaces of absence” – as Koolhaas defined them in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist – can have a stronger presence as a consequence of their history and, like the Berlin wall, generate a unique condition. In an empty city center or on city outskirts they often evolve organically. Focusing on Madrid and Rome, this paper first, proposes to re-visit the significance of Stefano Boeri’s peripheral sites in L’anticitta (or The Anticity), “terrain vague” or waste ground (Ignasi de Solà-Morales) sites and Marc Augé’s Non-place(s). Second, it uses the visual essay to contemplate the critical role that these three types of spaces of absence can have in the European city and argues that the very attribute of absence that they contain can, conversely, create urban presence by stitching together urban infrastructure and everyday collective life.

Terror Terroir: Building Disruptive Possibilities in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Folly

Summary Ivan Vladislavić’s 1993 novel The Folly has received less critical attention than his other writing. The novel was republished recently and, in this article, I read The Folly as a text that, from the vantage point of 1993, stages white South African suburbia as a site fraught with tensions. In the novel, the appearance of a drifter on a terrain vague dissolves the certainties of a suburban neighbourhood, creating an inchoate but gnawing sense of threat that finds expression in the Malgas family. I argue that white suburbs are under-examined cultural sites whose mundanity disguises their disci- plining principles. I draw on experiences of inhabiting ‘white space’ as a Black person to read Vladislavić’s novel as parodying white unease towards spaces that disrupt the taut or smoothed surfaces of suburbia. This unease is reflected most visibly in the post-apartheid evolution of such suburbs into lifestyle clusters, security estates and other configurations of life that are arranged around the alleviation of white middle- class anxieties.

A Mosaic of Fragility: Interdisciplinary Ties between Morales’s Weak Architecture, Tarkovsky’s Weak Man and Vattimo’s Weak Thought

ABSTRACT Fragility allows a deep development and understanding of the tie between the self and the outer surrounding. It softens the friction on the threshold between the known and the unknown. The paper elaborates three manifestations of fragility: Tarkovsky’s weak man [sic] presents meekness as a silent receptivity of the world; Vattimo’s weak thought demands a desire to search for the farthest Other – through sacrifice and kenosis; Sola-Morales’ weak architecture celebrates the undefined terrain vague and the rediscovery of ruins as layered trails of transience. A comparative understanding of the three manifestations brings an alternative reading of architectural history as a multiplicity of many realities that a single history masks, addresses, and reinforces. Here, the historian is an archaeologist, re-creating a mosaic of space-time: continuously operating between the bare evidence and its meaningful contemporary translation into a historical narrative.

The Western Frontier and American Pulp in la Zone: Marcel Carné's Terrain vague (1960) as Proto-Banlieue Film

The Western Frontier and American Pulp in la Zone: Marcel Carné's Terrain vague (1960) as Proto-Banlieue Film

Under Construction: Urban Practices of Terrain Vague in Upper Silesia

The Silesian conurbation consists of large amounts of terrains of uncertain status. Empty areas left after closed coal mines, ironworks, decommissioned working-class recreation zones or simply SLOAPS (Spaces Left Over After Planning) tend to be increasingly noticed by Silesian citizens nowadays and the experience of terrain vagues has become an important factor shaping their daily routine. The article covers the one, chosen distinct Silesian terrain vague location: the landscape park Żabie Doły (situated in municipalities of Bytom – Chorzow – Siemianowice Śląskie) in a quest to investigate the „unintentional landscape” as a place of different independent urban practices, undertaken by inhabitants. Terrain vague is being presented as an opportunity rather than a burden for a modern urban planning.

Landscape—A Review with a European Perspective

This article aims to act as a general literature review regarding the landscape, analyzing it through a synthesis of the main concepts and processes that have generated, and subsequently developed, the word “Landscape”. It is a versatile theme, because it has always been studied by various disciplines, through different theories, which sometimes even conflict with each other. Through the present text, we understand the importance and the unique value of the landscape, a value that has nowadays been transfigured by the strong industrialization and strong brand of man in the territory. Thus, the first part of the research is, to some extent, a reflection on current issues that are related to the landscape. It is also a tool for integration, including in the definition of “Landscape”, even those heavily humanized, exploited, degraded, abandoned, and residual; the so-called “Drosscape”, “Friche”, and “Terrain Vague”. The solution is not to negatively interpret these types of scenarios, but rather to enhance them as they are, filled with potential and creativity. This concept is achieved by means of an operation of recycling or reuse of waste, which is capable of germinating new life cycles within the “dead nature” of our increasingly cemented territories.

De la “tabula rasa” al “terrain vague”. El vacío como comienzo

The relation between man and territory is always mediated by the particular understanding of where does the point of departure stand. This seminal situation needs to be described before any action can take place. Traditionally, the modern attitude towards the existing has been defined by a ‘tabula rasa’ approach, that is, the erasure of past traces as the only way to bring about the new. Le Corbusier’s visionary plans for Paris are usually taken as a paradigmatic case for this ideal of a cleared-out departure, which still today haunts the architect every time he is confronted with the design of a large scale intervention, as is made evident at certain works by OMA. On the other hand, the term ‘terrain vague’ started being used during the last decades of the past Century to describe an alternative emptiness; one that claims no zero state of things, but admits instead the embedded information of a place, even if it is scarce. This postmodern reading of the territory was first promoted by art, photography or films, and then absorbed into the architectural practice with the promise of building up another kind of origin where the non-normative and the accidental are welcome. By the confrontation of these two well known phrases, the neutral condition of emptiness itself is problematized, interrogating at the same time the nature of our current disposition towards the territory.

Sonic refugia: nature, noise abatement and landscape design in West Berlin

This paper extends the history of landscape design and urban green planning by discussing the work of landscape designers in West Berlin, who attempted to create ‘sonic refugia’ using trees, bushes and other plants for noise abatement purposes. It expands the narrow conceptions of landscape as a solely visual experience also to include the acoustic realm. Motivated by increasing concerns over the physiological and psychological effects of noise pollution, and drawing on late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas of nature as a remedy for the negative effects of modern urban life, this paper places the work of landscape designers in the context of ongoing discourses on the intersections of urban nature and public health. Sonic experiments with plants of the 1960s not only draw our attention to the acoustic qualities of urban nature, but also open reflections on the wider historical, political and cultural contexts in which urban landscapes were experienced. Hereby, West Berlin’s marginal spaces or terrains vagues, which emerged as accidental by-products of the island city’s spatial confinement, were exemplary sites in their attempts to foreground the sensory experience of space.

Interstitial Occupancies: From Industrialization to Informal Urbanism in Monterrey, Mexico

As the third largest city in Mexico, Monterrey is a manufacturing hub that offers a provocative counterpoint to industrial cities in developed countries. Suburban sprawl, political instability, violence, social injustice, and de-industrialization illustrate increasing fragmentation—or terrain vague—where the conventional urban fabric unravels and less formal occupancies unfold. Defined by Catalan architect and theorist Ignasi Solà-Morales, terrain vague is expressed through obsolescence and various organic practices that react to depopulation and under-productivity. Investigating production and city-building, this article positions post-industrial Monterrey as a place of difference reflecting hybridized Latin American and American normative conditions. It surveys processes of industrialization and changing technology to situate iconic European and American architectural and urban precedents as forerunners of similar conditions in Monterrey.