Spatial Design for New Typologies of Places: In-Between Urban Spaces

The territory of the third millennium is transforming the ways in which users inhabit space. The contemporary dynamic condition of urban spaces and places calls for new design tools, as advanced as the context where they are applied. They must be capable of expressing new poetics/qualities/meanings that suit the modern, global spread of territories, the various urban environments they generate, and their configurations. The formal deconstruction of the contemporary metropolis is a direct consequence of the processes of social and economic transformations currently underway. Our Age of Access provides a transition from an economy largely dominated by the market and the concepts of goods and propriety, to an economy dominated by intangible values such as culture, information and, mainly, relational aspects that activate new qualities. In this scenario, the Design challenge is to understand the meanings, roles and the inter-relations of: man (concept of identity), post-industrial society (global/local), city (multiple civitas) and places (hyper/hybrid). The post-industrial development has created undecided spaces - not purpose oriented - which can be called other spaces. These are areas of refuge for diversity, and places of strong dynamics. They are places that are continually subjected to new programs of use, often through processes of spontaneous re- functionalisation. These typologies of uncommon spaces involve a departure from the notion of technical functionality of spaces to that of a dynamic semantic system of liminal places (the concept of the cultural geography of travel). In these typologies, there is potential for the in-between spaces - particular urban environments, marginal and residual, produced by the urban sprawl - to become new meaningful places and hence new types of public domain. In this sense, this chapter intends to show how Spatial Design stands as a privileged design activity for the design of spaces (interior/exterior) and its related tools/equipment systems through innovative environmental, relational, and logical configuration strategies – both progressive and regressive, and even systemic.