Symposium 04. and 05. February 2010
Technische Universität München, Institute for Urban Design, Urbanism and Landscape
Chair of Landscape Architecture and Public Space
Call for Papers | Infrastruktururbanismus

Modern high capacity infrastructure creates accidental space along its periphery, and in the shadow of its own spatial configuration respectively. It is kind of a shadow city that emerges from the peripheral space along motorways, train tracks, elevated highways, pipelines, cable tracks – urban space free from explicit definition and intentional design. In the very places where car parks, rubbish collection facilities, vacant lots due to setback requirements are evolving, the city dissipates its own realm to an unaccounted extent. This “waste” is rarely given a proper name or address: Under the bridges. At the car park. Along the train tracks. In the rear of the stadium. Next to the sewage plant. Descriptions of space that work just about anywhere and that could hardly be more unspecific.

The examination of these spaces in the scope of a symposium is not aimed at finding a recipe for the beautification of these infrastructural margins, but rather at developing their potential as public spaces, which carry an aesthetic expression of their own. It is exactly along these margins where public space can unfold its neglected potential as a space of heterogeneity, because public space is a spatial conception, a phantasmagoria, regardless of its functioning as urban public space or public space defined by landscape. It is capable of an ‘in-between’ state, of tolerating a clash and it provides contemporary urbanism a presence as a fragile state of superimposition. The ambiguity of public space between the poles of mobility and locality, and its disability to allocate itself to one or the other, and as well its disability to achieve reconciliation or compensation among the two poles and to escape the ‘in-between’ state, makes it an archetype for the phantasmagorial view of the ‘urban’ city.

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