Geographies of possibility. Designing conditions for program-less urban voids in Italy and the Netherlands

Abstract

“What function for this void?” presents itself as a technical question, but conceals an implicit vision of what space is and who has the power and tools to define it. It assumes the void is an interruption to be healed, a disorder to be brought back to order. However, in infrastructural urban margins, design must not prescribe, but enable. It is not a leftover to be refunctionalized, but an operational field to activate transformation trajectories with planned transience, without predetermining the outcome. We should instead ask ourselves: “What conditions must be defined so that this space can be acted upon?” This marks the shift from design as an answer to design as a question and research tool, an interface between institutional and usage times, norms, and practices. The ‘acted space’ is not a container to fill, but a condition to negotiate: giving space without necessarily making form, turning indeterminacy not into a fragility, but into a design resource, an operational threshold.