The purpose of this master thesis is to attract attention to the undefined spaces of our urban landscape and emphasize the need of these spaces in the city. The different values of these spaces are here clearly presented so that they can be considered when real estate developers show a particular interest in any one of these undefined spaces.
The term undefinied spaces can mean a lot of things. The spaces that I now choose to define as undefined spaces are neither planned nor designed. It could for instance be a piece of leftover land in between two residential areas, or as times change, a formerly planned area might be forgotten and left to its own. It could be an old railway embarkment or an empty allotment.
These spaces are most commonly found in the city centers where buildings are predominant and the rest of the land is precisely designed, defining each and every function. The existing undefined spaces have here somehow escaped the processes of planning. They are undesigned, free and untamed areas of the city. They typically have quite obvious borders to the rest of the city because of their lack of maintenance. Often the undefined spaces can give you a certain feeling of freedom.
During the study of the four chosen perspectives: children, ecology, urban life and densifying the city fabric it has beome evident that undefined spaces are important and that they are being used by many different groups. For children and youth the spaces are a possibility to escape supervision, a free haven for creation of their own places. As for the ecology perspective the undefined spaces are urban homes for many threatened species. The urban life perspective discuss the needs of the modern human. For example the need to be able to withdraw from the upbeat pace of the city. Sudden freedom and the possibilty to create a space of your own. The densifying the city fabric perspective shows that it is in the densest parts of our cities that the need for undefined space is most imminent. There, more than in other places, you sometimes need to take a break from it all. But it is also in the densest urban environments that the threat of exploitation is the greatest.
During my inventory of Södertälje I found a great deal of different undefined spaces. I divide them into traffic-spaces that mainly separate different traffic areas and abandoned-spaces that are neither planned nor designed for any specific purpose. The abandonned spaces are all analysed through the four perspectives mentioned above. Fifty percent of the spaces turned out to be important in all of the three perspectives; children, ecology and urban life. Approximately half of these important spaces are also threatened by building exploitation.
I then continued working with one specific space in Södertälje and in that context I suggested some interventions. These temporary attractions all strive to maintain the undefined character of the space but at the s...
