Guest Editor

Hocine Aliouane-Shaw / ENSAP Bordeaux, France

Situations, Practices and Shared Stewardship at the Margins of City-Making

This issue explores unscripted grounds: environments left open, undefined or held in suspension that often occupy blind spots in conventional architectural practice and spatial planning. These are spaces of various scales that have slipped out of formal and institutional control. Rather than disappearing altogether, they remain hidden in plain sight; and as former functions wane, informal and unforeseen ones begin to emerge. Drawing on Ignasi de Solà-Morales’s notion of the "terrain vague" and related debates on liminality, in-between conditions and vacancy, unscripted grounds also refer to places where scripts of ownership, use and value are loosened and not yet stabilised.

This issue asks how such grounds can be approached as situations where new ways of acting and living together may be rehearsed – and learned from – in order to inform more transversal and bottom-up approaches to architectural practice and urban planning.

We are particularly interested in contributions that treat these engagements as forms of inquiry – whether research, pedagogy or practice – and that reflect explicitly on their methods, positionalities and, where relevant, the ethical questions raised by participatory, collaborative and co-produced approaches.