Urban Interstices

Bringing together a team of international scholars with an interest in urban transformations, spatial justice and territoriality, this volume questions how the interstice is related to the emerging processes of partitioning, enclave-making and zoning, showing how in-between spaces are intimately related to larger flows, networks, territories and boundaries. Illustrated with a range of case studies from places such as the US, Quebec, the UK, Italy, Gaza, Iraq, India, and South-east Asia, the volume analyses the place and function of interstitial locales in both a 'disciplined' urban space and a disordered space conceptualized through the notions of 'excess', 'danger' and 'threat'. Warning not to romanticize the interstice, the book invites us to study it as not simply a place but also a set of phenomena, events and social interactions. How are interstices perceived and represented? What is the politics of visibility that is applied to them? How to capture their peculiar rhythms, speeds and affects? On the one hand, interstices open up venues for informality, improvisation, challenge, and bricolage, playful as well as angry statements on the neoliberal city and enhanced urban inequalities. On the other hand, they also represent a crucial site of governance (even governance by withdrawal) and urban management, where an array of techniques ranging from military urbanism to new forms of value extraction are experimented. At the point of convergence of all these tensions, interstices appear as veritable sites of transformation, where social forces clash and mesh prefiguring our urban future. The book interrogates these territories, proposing new ways to explore the dynamics, events and visibilities that define them.

Introduction, Andrea Mubi Brighenti; Chapter 1 What Sort of a Legal Space is a City?, Nicholas Blomley; Chapter 2 Trajectories of Interstitial Landscapeness: A Conceptual Framework for Territorial Imagination and Action, Luc Lévesque; Chapter 3 Tent Cities: Interstitial Spaces of Survival, Don Mitchell; Chapter 4 Spatial Justice in the Lawscape, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos; Chapter 5 Coming up for Air: Comfort, Conflict and the Air of the Megacity, Peter Adey; Chapter 6 Automobile Interstices: Driving and the In-Between Spaces of the City, Iain Borden; Chapter 7 Interstitial Space and the Transformation of Retail Building Types, Mattias Kärrholm; Chapter 8 Interim Users in Residual Spaces: An Inquiry Into the Career of a Pier on the Hudson Riverfront, Stéphane Tonnelat; Chapter 9 The Urban Fringe as a Territorial Interstice: On Alpine Suburbs, Andrea Mubi Brighenti; Chapter 10 Active Interstices: Urban Informality, the Tourist Gaze and Metamorphosis in South-East Asia, Ross King, Kim Dovey;