Open Space Appropriations and the Potentialities of a “City of Thresholds”

It is probably very difficult to consider spaces that are included in the urban milieu of a city as empty spaces. The term terrain vague in all its complicated etymological links seems to suggest primarily this possibility: empty space. And it is true that sometimes people tend to describe certain urban spaces as spaces with no content. However, what this gesture of naming, defining, or simply describing such spaces does is to institute a comparison: Spaces are empty compared with others that are not, and spaces are perhaps emptied compared with others that are being filled.