01 Finding the Urban Yards 1.1 Yard Inventory
The occupation and the presence of the urban yard sites has been casually observed by myself and discussed with others. This is how they were initially ‘found’. They are understood and cherished colloquially as an essential quality of the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne. Much of this casual observation has a tendency to romanticise the qualities of urban decay, abandonment, and subversion of the wider economic process of property ownership and development. However it is important to note that while there is support for and experience of individual terrain vague sites in the city, there is little clearly articulated agreement as to their specific nature. This is demonstrated through interviews with both local residence and officers of the local council as the responsible authority. I speculate that this is largely a result of the seemingly random and opportunistic ways in which these spaces appear in the urban fabric as well as how they are then appropriated and experienced. Both local residents and authorities consider them individually and not as a collection or part of a greater phenomenon. This chapter intends to seek, collect, categorize and make more specific the qualities and uses of terrains vagues in inner-northern Melbourne. A catalogue of fifty possible urban yards was assembled with a view to closer analysis that might help better define them. As this process was initially based on personal ‘hunches’ formed and recorded freely in the field, the collected examples were extremely diverse in a wide variety of probable defining characteristics. There might have been as many definitions as there were urban yards. After taking an inventory of fifty suspected urban yards sites it became apparent that there were no easily defined or common attributes shared by the spaces. I used the descriptions of (Solà-Morales Rubió 1994); temporal, ‘ambiguous, unresolved, and marginalized spaces in the urban landscape’ and the qualities embodied in the term ‘parafunctional’ (Papastergiadis 2002) as initial collective qualities. More specifically ‘parafunctional’ spaces are, through the Greek meaning of the prefix, those that are ‘similar to’, or ‘alongside’ the function of another space. This meaning also can be extended to include ‘in support of’ the function of another space. This definition allows comparison between different known functions and spatial types, such as ‘street’, ‘park’ or ‘playground’. However a ‘parafunctional’ space does not completely exist as a recognised type, it resists a singular unique function and will shift from one specific use to another. The ‘parafunctional’ urban yards are chiefly manifested as ‘small urban voids’, or spaces that at first appeared to have no specific or an ambiguous relationship to the adjacent land use. As they are also manifest as open spaces and can be occupied by the public they exhibit similar, but not exactly correspondent, qualities of the ‘public domain’ and ‘public open space’ of Hajer & Reijndorp (2001). Taking into account previously documented methods of observation and recording public urban space (for example, Whyte 2004; Cooper Marcus & Francis 1997) the study focused on an analysis of occupants’ behaviour. Much of this information about use was derived from the ‘behavioural trace’ mapping described by Cooper Marcus & Francis (1997 pp. 345-356). Ultimately, it was the ways in which urban yards were observed to be used by others that provided the most definitive and consistent test of these spaces.
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Once gathered I then used them to better define the how an urban yard exists. I began using several techniques; drawing, measuring, and mapping their locations with adjacent land uses. The aim was to translate the qualities of the urban yards in such a way so that they may be reasonable compared with each other.