Sitescape [Sitescape]

9 photographs | 93x74 cm. | Giclée | Edition of 3 +2P.A. | 2007-2009 The contemporary city, in its accelerated and competitive eagerness for growth, aims to make the most of phenomena like tourism or the holding of big cultural and sporting events to aid their expansion, improve their infrastructures and expand their resources. Urban planning is responsible for organising this growth, trying on the one hand to satisfy any shortages detected in the existing city and, on the other hand, anticipating the future needs of its citizens. During this process, the tools that allow for the management, maintenance and correct functioning of the city are also revised and generated. On specific occasions, urban spaces lie outside of this supervision, on the outskirts of the city, of its order and control. Whether this is because they have a delimited use in time, or they have become obsolete, or because it is not viable to conserve them in an appropriate condition, they become residual spaces where nature reasserts its own laws. Although they are consolidated places, perfectly delimited, with an assigned description and located in strategic places within the city, abandonment transforms them into neo-natural landscapes where weeds and flowers grow free, at random, out of reach of any designer. They are ‘islands’ that, within the big city, develop autonomously, spontaneously, without the maintenance or control that other urban space receives and where nature grows over the city. The Sitescape proposal analyses this type of characteristic and unique landscape of the contemporary city. The proposal is situated halfway between the definition that Solá-Morales makes of the Terrain Vague – abandoned areas, obsolete and unproductive spaces and buildings, undefined and without limits – and Manifesto of the Third Landscape, a territory defined by G Clement, where man abandons the evolution of the landscape and leaves it exclusively in the hands of nature.