Pioneering urban practices in transition spaces

Abstract The article suggests a set of design requirements to orient urban practices of transformation and space management when they work on transition spaces, which are difficult to interpret and classify in accordance with traditional dichotomous categories such as centre/periphery, urban/not urban, open/closed, abandoned/lived, public/private. The first part of the article explains how various disciplines describe and characterise this kind of space, which cannot be described precisely through traditional categories. Literature search indicates how transition spaces have a number of attributes that can be translated into requirements to steer design actions. The examples of urban practices, described in the central paragraphs of the article, quickly show how project actions actualize the requirements that can be inferred both from literature and from the examples themselves. The conclusions summarise the design requirements to transform and manage transition spaces, in order to orient “pioneering urban practices”, thus opening the way to different modes of intervention and offering new insights into the role of designers and users in this particular kind of practice. Promising prospects emerge not only for the design methodology of this type of spaces, but also for the possibility of addressing relevant issues in the current disciplinary debate concerning, on the one hand, the liveability and care of urban spaces and therefore the regeneration of public space, at a time in history when its existence is questioned, on the other hand the effectiveness of the involvement and empowerment of local societies in the processes of space transformation.