The Limit Toward Emptiness: Urban Voids as Public Space

Abstract

Cities are spatial aggregations of capital and culture that host and serve a vast array of different and often contradictory publics. For this reason, cities need spaces that accept and encourage multiple types of representations and forms of expression: planned and spontaneous, regulated and unregulated, permanent and temporary. This essay argues that emptiness is a spatial quality that can satisfy these needs and that urban voids are a paradigmatic example of empty spaces. The term "void" implies that these spaces are emptied of the value typically associated with cities as places of capital accumulation. But this emptiness (of capital, real estate value, efficacy, or production) is what enables other sensibilities and opportunities to emerge. In other words, a lack of value is what makes these vacant spaces appear as marginal, and this marginality is precisely what gives the urban voids the possibilities for publicness that other urban spaces do not have. Despite the social opportunities offered by urban voids, the evanescence of emptiness ultimately exposes the limits of urban voids.