From wastelands to waiting lands

In debates urban wastelands can appear caught between stigmatisation and romanticisation, viewed either as blight or obscure opportunity. How can we conceive of these spaces in a more productive, yet contingent, way? This article examines the political and conceptual meanings of urban voids and explores their significance to understandings of cities and urban development. To emphasise the ways in which voids are mobilised for particular agendas, the article shows how professional and political lenses on the ‘city’ become entangled with these spaces and generate exclusions and contradictions. This is illustrated through a discussion of emblematic voids in Berlin and the ways in which they are made legible in relation to wider socio-political objectives. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s notion of the wish image, voids are seen to become subject to utopian wishes for the city. Projecting desires onto these voids, city lenses mobilise support for broader wishes for the city, whilst never fully realising them. To usefully consider the relations between voids, cities and citizens, we draw on German debates to think of voids as Brachen, meaning fallow or waiting lands, where absences of urbanisation offer a moment of pause to reveal the diverse wish images involved in the making of cities. As waiting land, the void asks questions of urbanites: for what purpose is it waiting, how should it be (re-)related to the city and who should be responsible?