Urban Spaces: Urban Vacant Parcels

What Cities Can Do with Vacant Lots -- ArchDaily

Source: popupcity.net

How Food Carts Are Changing the Urban Landscape

Even business developers and investors got something out of this sustainable and local trend. With the building slowdown, property owners are glad to get rents from parcels and sites that are hard to develop.

Food carts are part of a new way to build the city. They contribute to make a city livable, interpersonal and attractive while compromising with density and space shortage. They encourage us to “think creatively about our local economies and the role we want our city streets to play.”  -- The Pop-Up City

Source: popupcity.net

Community Mapping

Thanks to hundreds of community-sponsored open space project sites, New York citizens have historically joined together to grow plants and set up green areas on empty lots, keeping up with the great efforts taken by Liz Christy and Green Guerrillas.  ‘Community garden’, a term which expresses traditional dependency of two life forms, brought together by common needs and giving benefit to each participant, is just one of the many shapes of the small green clusters scattered around the city.

Historically strictly linked to economical conditions and social health (Green Guerrillas were born in a period of deep crisis), these small, open projects are nowadays a collector of the energies and enthusiasm of the neighborhood, and therefore cannot be measured in strictly economic, social, psychological or political terms.  -- The Pop-Up City

 Source: http://phillyplayhouse.tumblr.com/

The Imbued Potential of Vacant Land

Vacant land is a looming problem for many cities, especially when it remains undeveloped for years or is transformed into garbage dumps and parking lots. But when designers begin to notice these voids within the activity of a city they are able to unlock the inherent potential in the land. That is precisely what “Not a Vacant Lot”, as part of DesignPhiladephia, did this October[2011]. Philadelphia’s 40,000 vacant lots are both a challenge and an opportunity for young designers, artists and architects to tranform these under-utilized spaces into experiences within the fabric of the urban environment.  -- ArchDaily