Manufactured Sites

Niall Kirkwood has edited a very interesting panorama on the problems of wastelands and brownfields from the overview of the landscape researchers [what they insist in calling "manufactured sites"].The book presents many well analysed study-cases and has a collection of theorethical texts produced by the editor and invited colleagues that covers many voids on this fundamental theme to better understand our complex and mutant cities.We just remain intriguing on the resistant use by the authors on terms and concepts well developed by many expertises on the problem, mainly the architects: the "terrain vague" classic concept developed by the Catalan Ignaci de Solá-Morales; "wastelands" and "brownfields" by many American authors; "urban voids" used by many European thinkers [Koolhaas] to describe and analyse these residual spaces, usually derived from the post-industrial territory.