Urban Form and Design Perspectives on Vacancy

Amongst the multiple definitions of “vacant’ in the online Oxford English Dictionary, the second primary definition is “devoid of all material contents or accessories; containing, or occupied by, nothing; unfilled, empty, void” (Oxford

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University Press, 2013). This definition has multiple connotations for designers, as it touches upon concepts of space, place, enclosure, center, and activity, amongst others.

While vacant has concise dictionary and legal definitions, vacancy in the urban realm is more similar to Justice Stewart’s famous take on obscenity (to paraphrase):

“you know it when you see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964). It is only upon physically entering areas dominated by vacancy that one recognizes to what extent the spatial realm has been disturbed. As individual lots on a block become vacant and abandoned, a sense of emptiness is created. Although the physical structure of the block, as defined by the relationship between street walls, trees, street furnishing, sidewalks, and intersections can remain stable in the face of a few empty lots, the structure of the neighborhood begins to disintegrate as multiple adjacent lots open up. A large number of vacant agglomerations can challenge the persistence of a city’s urban fabric. As elements of urban composition become isolated and lose any connection, “there is no longer a clear relation between one building and another, and between buildings and streets or open spaces… [it is] a freeing from all relationships between the elements which form the urban fabric” (Levy, 1999, p. 83).

3.4.1 URBAN FABRIC,STRUCTURE, AND BOUNDARIES

The layout of our oldest industrial cities and towns in the United States is unique, based on historical traditions of European colonization interacting with westward expansion, transportation access for commerce, and the gridded parcelization that facilitated early settlement (Jackson J. B., 1980). The distinct urban fabric that resulted from these various influences has two distinguishing features. The first is the continuous nature of the urban fabric due to cost premiums on transportation, information, and communication amongst workers and industries. The second is “the classic density gradient model of urban form,” in which the densest part of a metropolitan area is at the core, diminishing outwards (Mallach A. , 2011, p. 1860).

Due to its continuous nature and relatively uniform density gradient, any defect, discontinuity, or gap thus becomes magnified in terms of importance and significance.

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One of the fundamental connective tissues of the urban fabric in the United States is the street. Many Midwestern and Western cities were laid out with the speculative grid, easy to sell to prospective residents or investors and insensitive to natural topography. These streets came to identify neighborhood boundaries, make prominent civic connections, and create community identities. Functionally and aesthetically, they continue to provide historic roles, as noted by Jackson, dating to the earliest recognizable “street”

Now they discovered a continuous space with a quality – and eventually with a name – of its own. What had been two rows of heterogeneous structures now became the walls of a spatial unit. From the beginning therefore the street served to catalyze the confusion of houses and spaces of the early medieval town, introducing concepts of architectural orientation and harmony, and even façade (Jackson J. B., 1980, p. 65).

The street, thus, became an identifiable constructive element of the urban fabric along with individual lots and structures. The street gives underlying structure to these other elements which create the edges defining the street. This symbiotic relationship becomes damaged with the removal of buildings and the irregular introduction of vacant lots. While the removal of one or two constituent buildings can be overlooked, many losses will create an insurmountable visual breach in the structure of the street.

In a populated neighborhood, with few vacancies, houses provide a clear defining line, demarcating the private spaces from the semi-public space of front yards and the public space of the sidewalk and street. Vacant or abandoned homes do not serve this function well, as they are often made semi-transparent through the removal of doors, windows, and general lack of upkeep. When these buildings are removed, the vacant lots become gaps in the demarcation line. “Without physically demarcating and articulating the public and private domain as two distinct yet related zones both are threatened,” and the resulting ill-defined space is uncomfortable for both residents and visitors to these neighborhoods (Gusevich, 1986, p. 25). Christian Norberg-Schulz explains this need for an unambiguous environment, noting that “the distinctive quality

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of any manmade place is enclosure and its character and spatial properties are determined by how it is enclosed” (Norberg-Schulz, 1975, p. 430).

The street gives structure to individuals’ mental composition of their living environment. Trancik notes that

People require a relatively stable system of places in which to develop themselves, their social lives, and their culture. These needs give manmade space an emotional content – a presence that is more than physical. The boundary, or definite edge, is important to this presence (Trancik, 1986, p. 113).

By acting as a boundary, streets can define neighborhoods, cities, and communities as individual and specific areas, defining both what they are as well as what they are not. These definitions free residents from constant negotiation and renegotiation of where they are and who they are, enabling them to develop their lives within a commonly understood set of characteristics. Due to the proliferation of vacant lots, streets, neighborhoods, and blocks deteriorate as coherent entities, threatening the unity of urban spaces. J.B. Jackson commented on the importance of boundaries in urban life to create commonalities, particularly important in the multi-cultural environments represented by some of our oldest industrial cities

As the word itself suggests, a boundary is what binds us all together in a group, that which excludes the outsider or stranger. The boundary creates neighbors;

it is the symbol of law and order and permanence. The network of boundaries, private as well as public, transforms an amorphous environment into a human landscape, and nothing more clearly shows some of the cherished values of a group than the manner in which they fix those boundaries, the manner in which they organize space (Jackson J. B., 1980, p. 115).

3.4.2 INDETERMINATE SPACES

The integrity of the urban fabric in shrinking cities has also been challenged by the way that depopulation has occurred. Historically, when populations shrank, remaining citizens would cluster in the core of the earlier, larger metropolis for protection, companionship, and commerce. Mallach describes how this process occurred in Rome after the collapse of the Roman Empire and resulted in a new type of interstitial space. The depopulated area between the shrunken core and the former

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city walls, known as the disabitato (uninhabited place), occupied a green belt of formerly settled lands (Tice, 2005; Mallach A. , 2011; Waldheim, 2013). Current models of depopulation are extremely different, owing to modern patterns of property ownership and infrastructure provision as well as suburbanization and urban decline.

Depopulation and vacancy are concentrated in urban centers and emerge sporadically throughout a city, disturbing the industrial city’s density gradient and creating discontinuities in the urban fabric. Rather than being represented by a swathe of empty lands, as in the disabitato, vacant lands are now more individual and scattered, experienced as residual spaces (Mallach A. , 2011) or terrain vagues (Rubio, 1995).

These spaces, the terrain vagues, are a common occurrence in cities that have experienced modern patterns population decline and patchwork vacancy. Coined by Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio, the term has come to be commonly used to describe urban spaces of indeterminate history, use, and purpose. Rubio’s definition of the term as “empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place”

encompasses much of our urban sphere, in cities both shrinking and growing (Rubio, 1995, p. 119). It has been adopted by shrinking cities theorists (Oswalt P. , 2005;

Blanco, et al., 2009; Savitch, 2011) and primarily used to describe

Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative (Rubio, 1995, p. 120) (emphasis in original).

In these spaces, the sense of abandonment, of otherness, the “strange configurations of building remnants and overgrown trees and plans” draw users in, offering “possibilities for risky or transgressive activities” which may be in keeping with the otherness of the site, but not necessarily for the surrounding community (Franck, 2014, p. 154).

Thus, in many ways, vacant lots are tearing at the urban fabric of some of the nation’s oldest cities. Through interrupting the structure of streets to define and

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establish boundaries, through intermittent inversions in the city’s natural density gradient, and through the contribution of unintelligible terrains vagues, vacant lots challenge the vitality of our urban realm.

3.4.3 LOST SPACE,CRACKS, AND EDGES

In design discourse, there are multiple ways to denote vacant lots. These include open space, voids, and gaps. Ryan (2013) uses the terms “piecemeal” and “scattered”

to describe the individual spots of vacancy which lead to a “patchwork” arrangement of housing in previously entire neighborhoods. On a city-wide scale, vacant lots are just one type of the “gaps [which] disrupt the overall continuity of the city form”

(Trancik, 1986, p. 2). These types of spaces range from underused surface parking lots in the middle of cities and indeterminate spaces along highways and waterfronts to abandoned industrial complexes and the individual vacant lot. Simultaneously detrimental to their host city “antispaces, making no positive contribution… ill-defined, without measurable boundaries,” they also exist as potentially contributing assets, as these so-called “lost spaces, underused and deteriorating, provide exceptional opportunities to reshape an urban center” (Trancik, 1986, p. 4).

Loukaitou-Sideris uses the term “cracks” to describe the varied types of social and physical discontinuities that permeate the urban environment. These are inaccessible urban plazas, uncomfortable building/sidewalk interactions, the suburban shopping strips that lack sidewalks, and infrastructural railroads and highways that cut through neighborhoods. They are, however, concentrated in our depopulating inner-city neighborhoods in the form of decaying playgrounds, desperate public housing developments, and abandoned and vacant lots (Loukaitou-Sideris, 1996).

These cracks, or gaps, are a serious challenge to the cohesion of surrounding residents and can serve to further isolate marginalized populations. In inner cities, we especially need to “promote landscapes of integration and communication” as these streets and neighborhoods are often populated by residents with low amounts of social capital or political power (Loukaitou-Sideris, 1996, p. 100). These cracks need to be

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mended in order to create stronger, more resilient communities. If the gaps or voids become too large, mending them will take more social and economic inputs than are available in these struggling neighborhoods and cities.

3.4.4 SPACE AND ANTI-SPACE

Finally, the random dispersal of multiple vacant lots in a city threatens the experience of a “rich, complex and varied urbanism,” which is inherent to cities composed with a sensibility to space (Peterson S. K., 1980, p. 110). The coherent composition of the city is put at risk when the space of one or two empty lots in a defined area increases to encompass multiple, continuous empty lots, becoming “anti-space.” The concepts of space and anti-space are relatively congruent to the pre-Copernican definition of space as an area lying within some limits, or occupied by a body, and the post-Copernican definition of space as continuous and unlimited, undefined. The interpretation of anti-space as an “a priori continuum,” as something that is everywhere and indefinite, denies the possibility of a space having specific meaning or the ability to be manipulated (Peterson S. K., 1980, p. 91).

The inherent differences between these two types of space, one concrete and definable, one infinite and intangible, also affects the development of place qualities, as

The free, flowing aspect of anti-space obliterates the important distinctions necessary for the definition of place, which requires specificity and uniqueness.

By making everywhere the same, anti-space destroys honorific distinctions between public and private realms (Peterson S. K., 1980, p. 99)(emphasis in original)

When a neighborhood, street, or block deteriorates physically through the introduction of anti-space “physical enclosure is threatened, if not completely lost, as in the typical suburban strip development. This loss of physical enclosure, of articulated space, (whether implicitly or explicitly) defined, is also a loss of civic values, of shared meaning” (Gusevich, 1986, p. 25). These locations have now transitioned into a type

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of “placelessness,” without an “identifiable ‘sense of place’ or character [to make] them individually distinctive” (Relph, 1976; Sime, 1986, p. 54).