Interstitial constellations and their evocative emptiness

The interstitial spaces that lie between built-up areas depict a varied geography of non (or less) urbanised lands that are often labelled as undeveloped or as opportunities to stich the city’s fabric with updated forms of order. At a city scale, open tracts between neighbourhoods, brownfields, empty sites, or under-motorways are cases in point, while other more built-up interstices – such as abandoned buildings, gardens, or back alleyways – appear as apparently integrated but nevertheless forgotten or marginalised. At large scales, the countryside between cities also remains somehow forgotten from the hectic urban, while being depositary of excluded and gated communities, industries, unregulated developments, large infrastructures, and post-human architectures. What is usually missed in this depiction of interstices, however, is their (contradictory) beauty and evocative stand precisely as spaces of dereliction, abandonees, ruins, vagueness, uncertainty, undefinition, emptiness, and the influential effects they have in the cognitive processes of spatial orientation, imagination, identity, and attachment, and futurity; elements that count for the beauty of interstitial spaces during their transition to urbanisation. The insights could serve to reflect upon the meanings of the emptiness, and the role of actors and communities around preservation and change.