Lessons from the Brownfield: considering the self-generating city

The issue of urban wastelands in Western cities arose in the second half of the 20th century from the encounter between the spaces of deindustrialization and the emergence of new political, ecological and libertarian imaginaries. In spaces abandoned by the real estate market and urban policies, groups of young protesters experimented with temporary autonomous micro-societies. Today, the spectrum of social practices and symbolic production arising from urban wastelands has widened. In the wake of the ecological crisis, these places have become the focus of new challenges and conflicts, ranging from potential reserves for urban expansion, to available spaces appropriated by local – and less local – residents, or places where fragile, sacralized wilderness reappears within the metropolis. Considering the history of some urban wastelands in Europe from the 1970s to the present day, this contribution investigates how these spaces, due to their availability and affordances, can welcome beings, practices and arrangements left aside by urban policies. Doing so, they shed light on the grey areas of institutional planning practices, whether these are based on top-down or bottom-up methods. Furthermore, the relational, cultural and ecological values that develop there, as long as they escape commercial exploitation, illustrate particular modes of space production (in Lefebvre's terms). This paper attempts to characterize these specific modes, and to assess their possible contribution on contemporary urban thinking.