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This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy.
Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.
Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasn’t worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.
Cian O’Callaghan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Trinity College Dublin.
Cesare Di Feliciantonio is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Introduction ~ Cian O’Callaghan and Cesare Di Feliciantonio
Part 1 ~ Rethinking Ruination in the Post-Crisis Context
Rem(a)inders of Loss: A Lacanian Approach to New Urban Ruins ~ Lucas Pohl
Dignifying the Ruins: A Former Jewish Girl’s School in Berlin ~ Karen E. Till
Traversing Wastelands: Reflections on an Abandoned Railway Yard ~ Sandra Jasper
Building the New Urban Ruin: The Ghost City of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner Mongolia ~ Christina Lee
Part 2 ~ The Political Economy of Urban Vacant Space
Nullius No More? Valorising Vacancy Through Urban Agriculture in the Settler-Colonial ‘Green City’ ~ Nathan McClintock
Conflicting Rationalities and Messy Actualities of Dealing With Vacant Housing in Halle/Saale, East Germany ~ Nina Gribat
Post-Disaster Ruins: The Old, the New, and the Temporary ~ Sara Caramaschi and Alessandro Coppola
The Post-Crisis Properties of Demolishing Detroit, Michigan ~ Michael R.J. Koscielniak
Guarding Presence: Absent Owners and the Labour of Managing Vacancy ~ Lauren Wagner
Part 3 ~ Re-Appropriating Urban Vacant Spaces
Politicising Vacancy and Commoning Housing in Municipalist Barcelona ~ Mara Ferreri
Spatio-Legal World-making in Vacant Buildings: Property Politics and Squatting Movements in the City of São Paulo ~ Matthew Caulkins
(Im)material Infrastructures and the Reproduction of Alternative Social Projects in Urban Vacant Spaces ~ Cesare Di Feliciantonio and Cian O’Callaghan
Tracing the Role of Material and Immaterial Infrastructures in Imagining Diverse Urban Futures: Dublin’s Bolt Hostel and Apollo House ~ Rachel McArdle
Conclusion: Centring Vacancy – Towards a Research Agenda ~ Cian O’Callaghan and Cesare Di Feliciantonio