(Flexible, adaptive, and changing) frees and enhances the potentiality of the “free space’;
thus allowing its maximum functional and symbolic fruity.
In the search for possible applications of this strategy, it is inevitable to avoid looking
at spaces that are heavily used, but usually lacking of qualitative solutions, these are
the spaces of commerce. They are defining spatial/ functional realities often
predominant in the contemporary urban geography and they could be ideal
experimental sites. They are affecting communities far more than others are. These
spaces are the most lived and experienced since they go beyond the mere need of
commerce to pursue and satisfy the natural need for sociality. Furthermore, they are
of a different typological nature depending on the demands of different social classes.
Institutional, controlled, delimited territories, often lacking of an identity or
suffering of “placeless nests” [3] contrast to spontaneous and unregulated ones. The
latter are, especially in cities that have seen recent demographic explosions, in much
larger quantity than the first ones. The whole “world” is on sale in fixed or temporary
markets on the edge of the city’s most important nodes. They live in symbiosis with
roads and transport infrastructures, exploiting massive daily commuting of potential
users or customers placing themselves in abandoned, unresolved, or unfinished spaces.
Indeed, infrastructures always foster “habitats” between themselves and the urban fabric.
Their being artificial (bridges, railways, viaducts) or natural (rivers) is irrelevant. The
city always produces a kind of “no-sense” zones when it meets such urban devices.
Therefore, the “resulting areas” (defined as “under” or “between” the infrastructure and
the city) become “places” of lack of institutional interest resulting in unplanned space
quality.