ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the book’s major question and hypothesis: urban sprawl – and the urbanisation process – is not only composed of built-up lands but also ‘interstitial spaces’. These interstitial spaces lie between development and manifest as undeveloped areas and open tracts of different sorts, including from the liminal spaces within suburban neighbourhoods up to the vast rural areas between cities and regions. Here, some of the most radical economic, functional, social, and environmental alterations that influence the nature of cities occur, contributing to their spatial fragmentation and what makes them ‘urban’. It is argued that the interstitial spaces represent an ignored realm and thus, the chapter draws attention to the interstitial spaces as a way of shifting the city-centred focus in the studies of urban sprawl and the urbanisation process. Before presenting the structure of the book, the chapter introduces the book’s aims, the research design and rationale, and the case study – Santiago de Chile – as the empirical base for the in-depth examination of the interstitial spaces. The chapter finally presents the contributions of the book – in both theoretical and practical terms – for the studies of cities, the urbanisation process, urban sprawl, and interstitial spaces.
