Reusing Lost Urban Space

Abstract

The city is one of the greatest products of human civilization that has been built to provide services; safety and comfort. However, uncontrolled urban growth caused some anonymous, and unsightly images of the cities among which are underused, abandoned, or deserted urban space. Public space in cities reflects social life, and hosts community interaction; the absence of social interaction changes the public space to wasted and lost spaces. Wasted urban space leads to the discontinuity of the urban fabric creating meaningless unstructured landscapes within the city’s urban fabric. Wasted space is the unrecognized areas of land that are in need of redesign; their value is derived from their potential in vitalizing and connecting their surrounding urban context.

The research significance lies in recognizing the importance of community urban open spaces, their value and impact. The research also addresses the reuse and the regeneration of lost urban spaces in order to enhance the physical and social quality of life in urban open space. In addition, the reuse of in-between left over space is an incremental process that is addressed in building totally new cities which follow phasing development plans; as well as vitalizing the land of already existing cities.

Connecting or stitching the discontinuous urban fabric, represents an exploratory process in the relationship between infrastructure and the urban fabric and seeks to establish an architectural solution to leftover spaces within the city. In doing so, the research establishes a framework (criteria) for reuse of lost urban space by implementing an inductive and deductive analytical methodology applied to relevant examples and case studies of lost urban space.