ABSTRACT
Many European cities in the twentieth century had centrally located residual areas which were considered to be wastelands or temporarily unusable areas by the local planning authorities. However, these areas often functioned as intensively used semi-public spaces and as starting points for new cultural and leisure activities as well as for new services and economic enterprises in the shadow economy. These functions and potentials of temporary uses of wastelands as a motor of urban change were the topic of a European Research consortium in which we participated.1 The present article is an offspring of this EU-funded research group in the programme ‘Cities of Tomorrow’,2 a research programme to develop European urbanity in cultural and economic terms.
