Demolitions, wastelands, empty lots

With my work I try to question urban planning through the study of places which escape a fixed definition of city or of architecture. Places as wastelands or abandon buildings which due to forgotteness or lack of interest escape a defined design.

I am interested in situations of change which show the instability of the city; buildings before, during and after their demolition. They are all that are very different to the image of their city that authorities would like to build.

The projects that I make in order to present those places are developed in 3 different ways: The realization of physical actions with a very direct message about how to get engaged with a site: as for example digging on an empty lot in order to find out what is bellow; to restore a market scheduled to be demolished; to renovate a shed etc…Other projects take the form of a longer research as for example when I spent years integrating in a community of allotment gardeners; calculating construction materials of buildings or city’s; identifying all the empty lots of a city and making a guide of them. And other projects take the shape of bringing the public directly to the “place of interest” as when I invite the public to see demolitions.

Some of those projects became more radical since I got more help and possibilities to realize them; so I stated working in Amsterdam while writing “tourist Maps “of the wastelands, in Liverpool I took the public to a guide tour to the wastelands; later on I open the gate of different empty lots that used to be closed before. And on my last projects, I could convince the owners of a terrain in the Harbor of Rotterdam and a terrain in the mining city of Genk to keep them empty and make sure that they stayed for many years undeveloped.


Lara Almarcegui, June 2006