In-between. Frammenti pubblici interposti: una risorsa per il disegno urbano

"In-between" public fragments: a resource for urban design - We are all too familiar with the failure to appreciate urban public spaces and the splintering of the latter that has resulted as the cities have spread outwards. There are many conceptual implications of this type of interstitial space. The notion of ‘in-between’ has been treated from to a wide range of perspectives. From an initial meaning of terrain vague, i.e. an abandoned but not necessarily barren area, one moves on to an interesting cultural approach which interprets these peripheral zones as a new wilderness, a ‘dirty’ second or third level reality that goes hand in hand with the concept of urban ‘pore’ or ‘porosity’, understood not only in the physical- settlement sense, but also in sociological terms (Lévesque, 2001-2003). A further related concept is that of liminal space (Paredes, 2005), an ‘interstitial passage’ between ‘fixed identities’ (Heidegger, 1950). Finally, the ‘space of flows’ character of this particular spatial category has been noted by various commentators and has been linked, both in architecture and urban planning, with hybridity and/or hybridisation