A Margin of Indeterminacy. Reevaluating the Potential of Residual Landscapes in Future Urban Development Strategies

This paper intends to reflect on the importance of landscape conditions, processes over time and change, particularly in transitioning countries like Albania, where cities are subject to fast urban growth and the proliferation of residual spaces, which result in antagonistic and confused landscapes - landscapes of mutation and crisis. Although residual spaces are a result of the rational organization of the urban territory, they have become the opposite of the organized world. Analyzing these landscapes at the micro scale we can learn from the natural order that shapes them and from the way the urbanized territory influences their existence; whilst at the macro scale they appear as scale less fragments, interruptions of the urban fabric that reveal a new geography. Their temporary suspension and availability to transformation – but also their unstable, dynamic, heterogeneous and chaotic character - generates an opportunity for designers to reframe the urban design discourse, acknowledging the value of indeterminacy and open-endedness. Residual spaces have the potential to become test sites for experimenting new urban landscape management strategies aimed at guaranteeing people’s comfort and health, responding to social needs, and contributing to the restoration of degraded urban ecosystems and the preservation of the environment. Residual spaces can become the genesis for possible futures.