Urban Voids – Reclaiming Urban Space

Existences of public spaces in cities are essentials for social interactions to take place, fostering the creation of sustainable, safe and livable cities. Although public spaces are often designed for certain activities, the existence of unplanned spaces and urban voids throughout the city offers an abundance of opportunities. This paper attempts to focus on the concept of urban voids (leftover spaces), identifying and analyzing the type of void that has a great potential for turning into public spaces through placemaking process. Space beneath the flyovers or bridges, the dead parking lots or nonreciprocal street edges are the spaces which are neglected and invisible to the citizens and therefore take away city experimental qualities, thus the attempt is to unearth the potentials of these spaces in context to built environment and surroundings at urban scale and prepare placemaking toolkit for using these spaces as a strategy to increase the public realm.