Socioplastics 11974 Vacancy Can Be the City’s Most Active Product
Vacancy is often recorded as an unused plot, empty floor or stalled project. VacancyDiadem asks how non-use can be actively produced and maintained because it preserves the capacity to speculate, exclude or reassign value. The distinction is between a space whose use has ceased and an arrangement in which keeping it available for future control has present effects. An empty building can influence surrounding rents, planning expectations and access to affordable premises while appearing to contribute nothing to the city’s daily programme. Rem Koolhaas’s writing attends to metropolitan congestion, programmatic instability and the changing relation between architecture and urban scale. Mike Davis analyses the political economy of urban inequality and the spatial consequences of uneven development. Their work provides different lenses on the city’s transformations. Together they make vacancy legible as a relation among land, policy, investment and anticipated use, rather than as a self-evident property of a building. An account of vacancy still requires case-specific evidence about ownership, duration and decision-making. Consider a centrally located building that remains empty while nearby cultural and commercial organisations struggle to find affordable premises. A study could reconstruct ownership changes, permission regimes, maintenance expenditure and public representations of future occupancy. It would compare the site’s conditions with local demand and establish which uses have been proposed, refused or made financially impractical. Emptiness alone cannot establish an owner’s intention. The relevant evidence lies in the sequence of decisions and the effects that continued non-use has on the surrounding field. VacancyDiadem treats withheld use as a possible form of urban governance. It can identify how the suspension of occupation distributes opportunity, waiting and speculative value. The marker also requires careful distinctions: temporary closure, dereliction, ecological rest and strategic holding may look similar in a photograph while producing different consequences. A detailed account would trace who benefits from each condition and who bears its costs. This approach places vacancy within the active production of urban futures, where an unoccupied site can shape what becomes available elsewhere.
REFERENCES
Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso.
Koolhaas, R. (1995) S,M,L,XL. New York: The Monacelli Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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