FINDING THE GAPS
Obsolescence is the germinal ground upon which new emergence roots. Between one round of development and the next, there is often a brief interval wherein a space or situation exists between contracts, where space becomes momentarily deterritorialised, unbound from its servitude. Urban space is never consistently utilised, for every hothouse of production creates a wasteland in its wake, the fragmented leftovers of gutter-space and of empty lots. The landscape loops to the eternal rhythm of rise and decline, endlessly enacting the cycle of dereliction and regeneration, of ruin and rebirth. Every burgeoning venture has already begun to run its course. Temporal margins open up a window of opportunity. Timely interventions can be made to stall progress, enabling the site to pause and catch its breath. Preoccupy spaces in order to interrupt them from more utilitarian inhabitation. Divert their attention; send them off track. Preoccupation points to an illicit species of occupation that insinuates itself before more legitimate or productive forms have taken hold. Its occupation is of an improper, dysfunctional, all consuming kind. It distracts the advent of other more useful or permissible kinds of activity. Preoccupation takes possession in advance of official or designated use. It is the tender trespass of a site that wishes for it to remain open.
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 57. Revised extract of a text previously published as ‘Room for Manoeuvre, or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins’ in Manual for Marginal Places, (Close and Remote, 2009).