ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates selected urban landscapes regarded as spatial “wastelands” to reveal the design tactics and practices employed in the recovery and reuse of public places deemed as marginal, overlooked, and/or damaged. In contemporary urban development parlance, terms such as waste of space, wasteland, laid waste, and place of no return suggest a pejorative framing of such places as lacking value, uninhabitable, and open to exploitation. Yet wastelands challenge normative urban design programs that promote generic urban renewal solutions; they demand more layered and open-ended solutions to changing environmental and societal conditions. Fortunately, some recent reuse projects indicate that renewal through tactical redesign, often combined with curated event programs, can positively affect public perception and occupation of abandoned places. In order to unpack the nature of wasteland transformation, Nicolas Bourriaud’s postproduction tactics and practices in art and design are employed to propose conceptual readings of places characterized by the need for novel programs for change. Postproduction strategies include spatial concepts such as zones of activity employed to uncover design strategies and interventions that result in transformations of waste(d) spaces into resilient, creative, mobile, and economical places for the everyday.
