Living Voids. Guidelines for the alleys of Yangon

Abstract

The residual is the place of contact between further urban expansions, an enclosed space to be regenerated, a void to be preserved and an opportunity to create new relations in the collapsed territory.

There is no more available space to build again, it is necessary to work “in between”, to recover and re-generate what has remained. These are residues where references are absent or weak, unsustainable holes with no relations and quality, demanding care and attention. The research proposes a change of direction: starting from a careful reading and interpretation of these “dispersion landscapes”, it elaborates some original hypotheses to open those selected areas (“residual landscapes”) to re-qualification dynamics. The “void” - always full of latent signs, mixed uses and memories - becomes the crucial occasion for the design of contemporary public space.

The alleys of Yangon are a perfect example of what is precisely defined as urban residue or stand-by landscape, which gives the idea of waiting and precious opening to identity integration, but also suggests potential movement and change. This is the knot and the hypothesis of research: that the free space trapped in the whole, may become a new centrality in the saturated territory, a privileged opportunity for the redevelopment of the city and the same margin.

The aim is to create a “minor” network, light and slow, of full discontinuity, but also of continuity within areas that are marginal, fragmented and isolated, whose quality is thus given a substantial contribution.

Thanks to this availability non-lieu become “strategic landscapes”, testing design fields and units from which regeneration starts. Shapeless voids, if well designed in their internal tissue and put in relation one to the other,– become dynamic systems for the re-development of critical contexts, fertile terrain with materials and traces for the re-construction of the future landscape. And it is precisely according to this critical view of the residue that the urban voids represented by the alley of Yangon will be studied and interpreted, trying to create dynamic spaces that meet the real needs of citizens and that generate a system of active public spaces in the city centre.