Eduardo Rico
Reclaiming the In-Between of Infrastructural Landscapes
The response of landscape architects to this emergent fabric has been that of denial, or even retreat into the comfortable space of boulevards, squares, waterfront promenades, and characteristic heritage centres, which continue to dominate the imagery of cities and the forms in which it is marketed for real estate consumption. Current focus on sustainability and human-centric design has further emphasised the dominance of manicured, dense spaces, fully designed and topped with all the possible nature-based solutions, which, in many cases, cater more for our nostalgia or lounge for Arcadian nature than having real environmental value. The question of infrastructure is hardly on the cards, since these spaces have to be rendered community-friendly and pedestrian at all costs.
This incapability of designers to come to terms with the material realities of the transport networks has helped to create a strong dualism between the inhabited spaces of the city and its infrastructure. On the one hand, we have an idealised pattern of dense urban fabric (at least so in Europe), linked to traditional systems of spatial arrangement easily marketable for real estate development (boulevard, piazzas, squares and so on). On the other hand, there are large chunks of city “out there” occupied by large-scale infrastructure which quickly connect us to other urban areas, sweeping through vast landscapes of no man’s land.
It is therefore worth exploring the potential role of these infrastructural landscapes in reshaping the image and experience of the contemporary metropolis. Rather than viewing them as voids or failures, it proposes understanding them as latent fields of opportunity. Through a systemic approach to scale and a broadened conception of ground as a spatial and operational category, these territories can become active agents in the production of urban identity.
The discussion begins by outlining conceptual categories that have attempted to describe these residual spaces, looking at terms such as drosscape, terrain vague, and the in-between. It then examines how infrastructural design principles can be reframed as strategic thinking capable of addressing complex metropolitan conditions. Through selected case studies such as the Trinitat Node in Barcelona by Batlle I Roig and the Hoenheim-Nord Transport Interchange by Zaha Hadid, we illustrate how infrastructural interventions can generate coherent landscapes in their own right, which emphasise the public, the common and the underlying character of infrastructure. We then move to question the implications of these projects for the wider image of the metropolis and propose new ways of strategising infrastructural grounds as collective urban space.
During the late twentieth century, a vocabulary emerged to grapple with these ambiguous territories. Among the most influential terms is drosscape, introduced by Lars Lerup (2) and Alan Berger (3). In his reflections on post-industrial urbanism, Lerup describes landscapes sterilised by contamination, barrier effects of linear infrastructure and industrial residue. These are spaces left over after economic cycles have shifted, leaving voids that we don’t know how to engage with. Lerup emphasises the interstitial character of dross, as systemic by-products of urban growth, forming a distributed network of open territories awaiting reabsorption into new cycles of urban production.
A second influential concept that we would like to bring is that is the terrain vague, most famously articulated by Ignasi Solà-Morales (4) . The term conveys ambiguity and openness. Vague suggests both vagueness and wave-like fluctuation. It captures the indeterminate, fluid, and often open-ended qualities of spaces left outside formal planning regimes. During the 1990s, terrain vague became central to urban discourse. Informal practices such as skateboarding under bridges, markets in railway arches, and spontaneous gardens in vacant lots would appropriate these overlooked territories, opening up ideas of how these could activate the city in alternative ways. Infrastructural margins could host vibrant, if unofficial, forms of urban life.
Both drosscape and terrain vague share a common thread: the apparent emptiness conceals a potential for semantic reappropriation. Their marginal status has kept them outside dominant stylistic discourses, real estate logics and aesthetic codifications and, paradoxically, has preserved them as raw material for alternative urban imaginaries.
Physically and semantically In-Between
The architectural historian Alberto Pérez-Gómez further frames these territories as “spaces in between.” (5) He situates them between the failed utopias of modernism and the nostalgic reconstructions of postmodern historicism. While planners oscillated between technocratic fascination and stylistic revival, infrastructural grounds remained conceptually unclaimed. It could be argued that this dichotomy is still present in our planning and design approaches, having mutated to a judicious balance between the smart-city optimism, an ever-present catalogue of nature-based solutions, sponge-city approaches or convivial solutions humanising every corner of our cities. When infrastructure enters public consciousness, it frequently does so through iconic gestures: signature bridges, spectacular terminals, landmark towers. These objects capture media attention and political capital.
However, the spaces-in-between are still there, not only physically, between carriageways and embankments, but also semantically. They do not easily align with narratives of heritage, nor the spectacle of high-tech innovation or the user-friendly nature-based solution for transport-oriented developments. This discursive marginality becomes their strength, opening a space for critical re-engagement beyond the binaries of nostalgia and positivism and obsession with Arcadia.
Against this backdrop, infrastructural landscapes offer a tactical alternative. Rather than producing isolated icons, they can work as a network of connective grounds and spaces to deliver a new spatiality for our cities. Their scale, rawness and connectedness resist easy commodification, shifting attention from the singular icon to a collective, continuous spatial experience. The key lies in redefining the character of these in-between grounds of infrastructure. Instead of treating them as neutral support for efficient movement, designers can conceive them as a layered platform where mobility, ecology, and public life intersect at different rhythms and paces from the city centres. These spaces become a site of negotiation between technical performance and a new public, collective experiential quality.
The two case studies we present in this article address this semantic and spatial in-between. They help think of the role of landscape design in accommodating a different scale and rhythm of perception, inviting a use and engagement which does not fall within the clichés of common development, but helps us imagine how a different city may function.
The Rondes de Barcelona exemplify how infrastructural works can generate cohesive urban landscapes. Constructed largely in preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games, the ring road system encircles Barcelona and traverses dense urban fabric, waterfront zones, and mountainous terrain. Unlike incremental bypass projects, the Rondes were conceived as a unitary project, allowing for coordinated strategies linking highway design with public space interventions.
Part of this project was the development of one of the highway nodes in the northwest, in the area of Trinitat. The layout of the node itself was conceived as an innovative typology, where the engineers initially proposed a large roundabout with extremely generous entrance radii connecting the three entering branches. Further pressures and requirements from the central government transformed the project into a hybrid between a circular structure and a spaghetti junction set of lanes to the north. The challenge that the landscape project faced was the integration of the internal area of the roundabout with the rest of the urban fabric, finding a convenient use for this interstitial area.
The project for the Parc de Trinitat Nova is centred around two main formal proposals. On the one hand, the existing difference in level between the node itself and the town of Trinitat allows for ramped access to the populated areas from the interior of the junction. Once inside, the landscape is organised around a series of concentric terraces and water bodies where the large morphology of the junction is replicated as a pure formal system. These terraces become ample grassed areas separated by lines of trees and linear sculptures.
Concentrated activities such as picnics are in the covered areas, while the terraced areas have lower footfall while being scenically visible due to their elevations and concave character. The geometries of the park are strong and efficient in conveying its infrastructural character. Its volumetry generates a bowl effect where the visitor is aware of the entire space almost at all times. This intervisibility makes the experience simple and welcoming without the need to revert to a profusion of landscape details. Moreover, the northern area offers wide views even in the presence of power pylons and the local railway.
The project manages to make the most of the infrastructure as it is, without trying to transform its character into a domesticated, convivial space, but as a generous, strong statement of the need to bring vital activities to a key piece of infrastructure in the city.
(a)
(b)
On the outskirts of Strasbourg, we find the Hoenheim-Nord Transport Interchange by Zaha Hadid, offering a different scale of intervention but, most importantly approach towards its use. The project is a combination of a park-and-ride facility integrating tram, bus, and parking infrastructure; the project transforms a residual territory into a coherent landscape.
The design employs a restrained palette of concrete, line patterns, and inclined lampposts. Parking bays, arranged in parallel and angled configurations, change gradually, generating a graphic field across the site, while the terminal building folds from ground to roof in a continuous gesture, merging architecture with infrastructural surface. The project avoids conventional urban embellishments. There are no ornamental trees or decorative pathways. Instead, the very same parking lines, the changing rhythm of the angles and their reference via the inclined luminaries, drainage channels, and parking geometries define the experience. The infrastructure’s own logic, slightly twisted and reinterpreted, departing from the building itself, becomes the aesthetic language of the landscape through a combination of powerful morphology and sober materiality.
By integrating movement patterns with architectural form, the interchange constructs a new kind of public realm, neither traditional square nor purely technical facility. It understands and emphasises the transient nature of the park-and-ride infrastructure without falling into the need to ornament and naturalise every corner. The more heavily transited areas receive a stronger spatial treatment in the passenger interchange, while the same gesture permeates the rest of the parking space with a much-welcome volumetric formula and material simplicity. Infrastructure dictates the guidelines, and the landscape modulates the experience.
These two examples show a way of thinking about landscape that is ever more relevant nowadays. The spaces are designed to be ample and generous. They are meant to be experienced as infrastructure, however done so from the pedestrian perspective. Their peripheral location implies they are not busy spaces with high footfall, yet this low occupation does not make them feel empty, as if they were missing a public that one locates in the renders of the competition entry. They are thought to be experienced with ideas of distance and amplitude in mind. Their scales are in consonance with those of the infrastructure they inhabit. Rather than trying to “fill” every corner with details and program, the design assumes amplitude and clarity through strong formal gestures commensurate with the mobility surrounding them. The designs do not try to be cosy, cute or manicured, but generous, sober and durable.
The designers transform the in-between character of the spaces, their leftover quality of dross, the cinematic experience of transport, into pieces of landscape to be experienced at a rhythm that is neither that of the vehicle movement, nor the one experienced in centre-city boulevards. Resisting the temptation to cram the areas with softscape, and pedestrian-friendly details and programmes, these spaces are lived, transitioned at a different rhythm in tune with their position in the city. In-between semantics can emerge from these landscapes, just as we need new ideas to define our cities, away from the all-encompassing commodification of spaces and lifestyles.
(2) Lerup, After the City.
(3) Berger, Drosscape.
(4) Sola-Morales and Costa, Present and Futures.
(5) Sola-Morales and Costa, Present and Futures.
(a) https://www.batlleiroig.com/en/projects/parc-del-nus-de-la-trinitat/
(b) https://www.zaha-hadid.com/architecture/hoenheim-nord-terminus-and-car-park/
Eduardo lectures at institutions such as the GSD, the Bartlett and the Berlage Institute, and has worked in the Urban Infrastructure Team at Arup as well as as an urban and landscape designer in a variety of projects with smaller firms in London.