The Interstitial Spaces of Urban Sprawl. Understanding the Components of the Unbuilt Suburban Geography of Santiago de Chile

Debates on urban sprawl remain strongly focused on the built-up space as main object of study. Nevertheless, undeveloped lands and open tracts are relevant for understanding land fragmentation, suburbanisation and transformation of fringe/belt areas of city-regions (Galster et al. 2001; Northam, 1971). They describe a large geography of interstices that have not been acknowledged in the planning literature. Planning policies regard them as just gaps in the urban fabric – somehow negative or inert – or as abandoned spaces that should eventually be urbanised. In this paper, I introduce a framework for understanding urban sprawl from its non-urban elements – the interstices – starting from a critical revision of current approaches used to describe these spaces in cities. I discuss interstices and their implications based on the case of Santiago de Chile. It reinforces the idea that urban sprawl is equally composed of built-up areas and interstices that play and active role in transformation of city-regions