ABSTRACT

Manifestations of terrain vague take diverse forms. Ever since Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1995) coined the term to describe a form of strange absence in the contemporary metropolis, scholars have studied the varying urban morphology of terrain vague—from abandoned spaces in a city (Oswalt, 2006) to spontaneous opportunities in the periphery (Lévesque, 2002), from urban waste landscapes (Berger, 2007) to postindustrial infrastructure (d'Hooghe, 2009), from an “adaptive capacity” of community design activism (Fuad-Luke, 2009) to a way of design thinking in places and non-places (Augé, 1995; Crang & Thrift, 2000). In the context of such a heterogeneous notion of terrain vague, we define terrain vague from the perspective of everyday urbanism (de Certeau, 1984) as a shifting urban form shaped by on-the-ground everyday actions, reactions, and appropriations of people, organizations, and institutions. Our definition is shaped by past academic definitions (descriptive and analytical identifications), but also interpreted through the lens of design, as we identify challenges and appropriate responses. The interstitial challenge of terrain vague is a design problem that requires understanding and restraint. To this end, we propose a vision of design as an act of tending, as opposed to linear problem solving. To tend to terrain vagueis to reach comfort with the apparent systems at hand, systems not created, regulated, or designed by architects or urban planners. Given the cultural and formal training received by most working urban planners and architects, the idea of tending, as opposed to colonialist creation, is a challenging limitation we term “the interstitial challenge.”