A (sub)urban world and the emergence of interstitial spaces

Description

The talk is an invitation as main presenter for a discusssion rountable organised by the Amsterdam Institute of Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) on innovations in urban design and planning. In the discusssion students and academic staff from the AMS and QUB participated together. The talk was structured in 3 parts:

Title: A (sub)urban world and the emergence of interstitial spaces:

Part 1: URBAN SPRAWL AND SUBURBANISATION IS EVERYWHERE
Against all predictions, the expansion of processes of urbanisation and the sprawling development of cities and regions have become a global phenomenon, which remains as one of the most longstanding patterns of urban development. Recent claims based on urbanisation trends indeed indicate that most people are living (and will live) in cities and thus, we are (and will be) in presence of an ‘urban’ world. This urbanisation process, however, has been questioned by the undeniable fact that what seems to be an urban world is really the manifestation of an extended, dispersed, fragmented, diverse, and multifaceted process of suburbanisation, in which urban sprawl goes rampant across developing and developed countries alike.

Part 2: THE WORLD IS NOT ‘URBAN’ BUT ‘SUBURBAN'
The data is undisputable: while the massive wave of present urbanisation is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities. Apposed to most orthodoxies, two thirds of the world’s population really live in ‘suburban’ areas, and more than 80% of urban dwellers in many cities are already 'suburban'. So, urban sprawl has become a challenging geography that remains as one the most intractable problems of our modern society; a geography that calls for the development of urban theories and experiments in planning beyond normative rationales and bi-dimensional conceptions of land use.

Part 3: WHAT TO LEARN FROM URBAN SPRAWL
Having been extensively examined in terms of origins, meanings, impacts, and underlying politics, urban sprawl still teaches us on how to conceive cities and their urban condition in at least two ways. First, the different planning and design approaches to control urban sprawl and its impacts, and second, the diverse array of interstitial spaces of different sorts (farming areas, brownfields, landfills, abandoned facilities, green corridors, leftover spaces, others) that lie between developments and that offer a range of unexplored potentials to re-structuring suburban environments. Clearly, urban sprawl and its resulting suburbia have been subject of a strong ‘city-oriented’ focus ant thus, examined through the lenses of an analytically plausible dimension: the built-up space. In this tradition, the interstitial spaces are not celebrated as wonders of cities and remain somehow invisible from the view of urban theories.

Period	11 Jun 2023
Held at	Amsterdam Institure for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), Netherlands
Degree of Recognition	International