Latent spaces in the city : hybrid practices in the urban realm

The paper discusses the potential of creative spatial practices aiming at the reactivation of abandoned or disused public places showing how artistic and collaborative practices can detonate complex processes of community reactivation and empowerment while rehearsing alternative urban models and city-making approaches. According to De Certeau, the city stages an endless, constant and silent battle between the apparatuses that produce disciplinary space, namely spatial practices, responsible for a secret structuring of the conditions of social life, and the various individual modes of re-appropriation, multiple and “multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.” (De Certeau, 1984: 96) These re-appropriation tactics and practices open up the way to another city, to another space, a space away from the clear text of the planned, readable or visible city. A space where another, invisible city lies. Such an ‘invisible’ city belongs to the realm of lived space; more precisely, life, the actual practices and relations taking place in space, the people inhabiting space, are sometimes able to imagine, engender and produce yet another type of space, or better still, a multiplicity of ‘other spaces’ that provide the locus for ‘other’ desires, needs, ideas, transitions, ‘becomings’, changes, actions and processes that would not find their place otherwise: a somewhat ‘invisible’ but fully lived space