The desire to condense the urban fabric and the need to overload it with multiple functions, has brought to the surface surplus, empty spaces, without any particular use of them. In the contemporary city vague spaces are formed and created which subsequently are considered “useless” for the structured environment. At the same time on the opposite side of the urban mass is the suburban fabric. A fabric that sometimes is “full” but on the contrary sometimes includes spaces that were absorbed by the landscape and time, spaces abandoned due to negative human or non_human intervention. They are the dysfunctional landscapes that have a vagueness in understanding them and are characterized as terrain vagues, they are the dead zones that are waiting to be properly utilized.
It is understandable that there is a diversity of terrain vagues, dead zones and urban voids. For a long time society has faced these empty spaces as non_parts of the city. There has been a constant indifference towards them and a simultaneous abandonment of vague spaces in the suburban area. All this has resulted in raising the interest of the architectural, artistic world in these spaces having as their main goal their optimal utilization.
In the first part of this study, these particularly complex terrains are recorded and analyzed so that they can be better comprehended. The research raises the following questions: What is urban void, terrain vague and dead zone in the realistic and artistic world? How can vague spaces be exploited and integrated with new determinants in the urban and suburban fabric? How can architecture act_ operate on a terrain vague, without becoming a tool of aggressive power and abstract logic? With what tools, philosophers, architects and various artists from the past to the present have approached, explored and represented these various landscapes of obsolescence both conceptually, synthetically and practically? These and other questions will be answered in detail in this research study.