This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasnt worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development. This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. Centring urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors develop new empirical insights that rethink ruination, urban development and political contestation over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and has not worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.
This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. The contributors develop new empirical insights that rethink ruination, urban development and political contestation over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.
Introduction ~ Cian OCallaghan and Cesare Di Feliciantonio
Part 1 ~ Rethinking Ruination in the Post-Crisis Context
Rem(a)inders of Loss: A Lacanian Approach to New Urban Ruins ~ Lucas Pohl
Dignifying the Ruins: A Former Jewish Girls School in Berlin ~ Karen E.
Till
Traversing Wastelands: Reflections on an Abandoned Railway Yard ~ Sandra
Jasper
Building the New Urban Ruin: The Ghost City of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner
Mongolia ~ Christina Lee
Part 2 ~ The Political Economy of Urban Vacant Space
Nullius No More? Valorising Vacancy Through Urban Agriculture in the
Settler-Colonial Green City ~ Nathan McClintock
Conflicting Rationalities and Messy Actualities of Dealing With Vacant
Housing in Halle/Saale, East Germany ~ Nina Gribat
Post-Disaster Ruins: The Old, the New, and the Temporary ~ Sara Caramaschi
and Alessandro Coppola
The Post-Crisis Properties of Demolishing Detroit, Michigan ~ Michael R.J.
Koscielniak
Guarding Presence: Absent Owners and the Labour of Managing Vacancy ~ Lauren
Wagner
Part 3 ~ Re-Appropriating Urban Vacant Spaces
Politicising Vacancy and Commoning Housing in Municipalist Barcelona ~ Mara
Ferreri
Spatio-Legal World-making in Vacant Buildings: Property Politics and
Squatting Movements in the City of Sćo Paulo ~ Matthew Caulkins
(Im)material Infrastructures and the Reproduction of Alternative Social
Projects in Urban Vacant Spaces ~ Cesare Di Feliciantonio and Cian
OCallaghan
Tracing the Role of Material and Immaterial Infrastructures in Imagining
Diverse Urban Futures: Dublins Bolt Hostel and Apollo House ~ Rachel
McArdle
Conclusion: Centring Vacancy Towards a Research Agenda ~ Cian OCallaghan
and Cesare Di Feliciantonio
Cian OCallaghan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Trinity College Dublin.
Cesare Di Feliciantonio is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University.
