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Visualising the riverbankAndrea Mubi Brighenti & Cristina Mattiucci

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Visualising the riverbank

Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Cristina Mattiucci

Drawing on ethnographic observation of a tract of urban riverbank in the city of Trento, innorthern Italy, we attempt to link phenomenological observation of social interaction inpublic places with larger political concerns about contemporary urban public space. Whileagreeing with Low et al. (Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space & Cultural Diversity.Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) that in order to foster public spaces it is necessaryto accommodate the differences in the ways social classes and ethnic groups use and valueurban sites, we also argue that one should be wary of planning hubris—which can occurin even ‘good-willed’ planning, and leads to the creation of domesticated and formalised,but also inherently restricted, spaces for encountering differences.

Key words: urban waterfronts, riverbank sociality, public space, planning, city of Trento

Introduction: exploring urban waterfronts

In 2009 and 2010, during the course of ayear, we conducted ethnographic obser-vation of a tract of urban riverbank in

the city of Trento, in northern Italy. Weundertook this research as an opportunityto both, rather classically, visualise thedetails of interaction in a public place—a‘small urban space’ (Whyte, 2001 [1980])—and, in a complementary way, advance areflection on the transformations of contem-porary urban space. Our aim was to showhow people use the material features ofpublic urban spaces (its ‘furniture’) as affor-dances for living in and perceiving theenvironment (Ingold, 2000). Furthermore,the apparently mundane routines of inhab-iting a place, with its daily rhythms andencounters, can be seen as expressing alatent stage of what Marcuse has called‘emancipatory forms of urbanism’ (Brenner,2009). While some urban theorists have high-lighted that a number of classical assumptions

about the relationship between public spaceand the political domain have become increas-ingly problematic (Amin, 2008), we suggestthat an analysis of living urban territoriesinspired by phenomenology—that is, a phil-osophy grounded in the notion of lifeworld—yet, one simultaneously capable oftaking into account wider urban associations,dynamics and assemblages, may be helpful ingrasping the new scales of human associationcreated by technological and social change, inthe context of the historical transformationof the cultural meaning of a place. As wehope to show in this paper, the waterfrontarea we chose provided a rich case in point.

In many cities around the world, urbanwaterfronts and waterscapes are contentiousand evolving places, where important plan-ning and political stakes are located. Farfrom being a passive background of urbandevelopment, rivers are dynamic elementsthat interact with human spatiality (Mauchand Zeller, 2008). Waterfronts have alwaysbeen central to urban social, economic and

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/12/01–20221–14 # 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.662378

CITY, VOL. 16, NOS. 1–2, FEBRUARY–APRIL 2012

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cultural life. Indeed, in the typical Europeancity, the waterfront initially determined thesettlement of the city itself, in connectionwith the control and exploitation of transitsalong waterways such as rivers or seas.During the ancien regime, water constituteda private spectacle for aristocrats whosecured for themselves a view of the waterfrom their palaces, towers and gardens.Later, in the 19th century the emerging bour-geoisie attempted to appropriate this exclu-sive relationship by building promenades,bridges with views and other similar facilities.Access to water played an important role forboth functional (economic activities, publichealth, etc.) and recreational reasons. Thedesign of modern urban parks in many19th-century cities in Europe and Americaprovides evidence of the strategic importanceof watery areas.

However, during the first half of the 20thcentury waterfronts were also spoiled, pol-luted and ‘uglified’ by industrial develop-ment. The nadir of waterfronts’ decadencewas perhaps reached with the economicdecline that afflicted many European citiesin the 1970s, when the industrial enginebroke down and no funds could be grantedto remove its toxic debris. In turn, the post-industrial conversion has invested intenselyin waterfronts. Redevelopment schemeswere deployed to help convert the by-thendecaying waterfronts into new ‘creative’ dis-tricts, often through iconic and flagshipprojects that attempted to turn them intohigh-value lands. At present, this seems tohave become a global phenomenon: we can,for instance, see examples of similar water-front developments in China (Chang andHuang, 2011). As summarised by Hubbard(2006, p. 5):

‘there is much contemporary mediadiscussion about the major reinvestment inthe heart of cities long regarded as “no-go”areas. Throughout the urban West, under theaegis of urban policies promoting urban“renaissance”, former manufacturing districtsare being repackaged and resold; derelict

waterfronts have become a locus forgentrified living and working; mega-malls,multiplexes and mega-casinos seek to capturethe dollars of the new urban elite.’

Usually, such processes do not occur withouttensions and conflicts (see, for example, thecase of Berlin, Scharenberg and Bader,2009). In the vocabulary of classical urbanecology, contemporary waterfronts wouldbe called ‘zones of transition’. Yet, it is notsimply a matter of succession of differentpopulations flowing in and out, but also andessentially a matter of stratification and coex-istence: waterfronts appear as urban stratifiedcompositions that result from different pat-terns of interaction between the activities ofcrossing a space and dwelling in it. Forinstance, in a study on two urban ‘interstices’in Paris, Stephane Tonnelat (2008) hasrevealed that leftover spaces, which functionas ‘margins of manoeuvre’ in larger urbancycles, host a whole range of ‘out of frame’,invisible activities by marginal people(including, for example, Roma settlements).Writing about European Mediterraneancities, Ciarallo and Nocera (2007) havedescribed urban waterfronts as ‘sponges’where different ‘speeds of flight’—e.g. tour-ists visiting the city vs. migrants looking fora job as cooks or waiters in restaurants, oras street vendors—meet and intertwine, sothat differential speeds merge in a relativelyundifferentiated space.

Before they are ‘regenerated’, and in manycases even after, waterfronts are territorieswhere carefully planned and leftover spacesmix. Such mixes are sometimes juxtaposed,sometimes contradictory, while, at othertimes, they foster the creation of curiousmediations. At the time of our observation,the urban waterfront in Trento was stillleaning towards the unstructured andunplanned pole, although a major renewalproject was already under way. If, as arguedby Conway (2000, p. 117), during the 20thcentury ‘a much broader perception ofparks, in all their many forms, as part of theeveryday landscape’ can be recorded, then

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through our case study we seek to show thatthis consideration should not be confined toofficially planned parks, but should alsoinclude all those forms of open-access green-ery that constitute veritable informal urbanparks. Indeed, despite its historical speci-ficity, the territorial and urban context ofour site shares significant similarities withthe trends that characterise many otherurban waterfronts around the world.

The city, its river and the coming of iconicarchitecture

Originally, the city of Trento was a river city,with strategic functions of control of thetransits between Italy and Northern Europealong the Brenner axis. Its location amid theAdige valley, which runs in the directionnorth–south from Bozen to Verona, made itperfect for this task. The city—as it wasdescribed by the French traveller FredericMercey in 1835—was walled, except on thenorthern side, where the river, flowing fromeast to west (from one side of the valley tothe other) provided a natural shelter. Trentoalso had a harbour, which is clearly visiblefor instance in a water painting by AlbrechtDurer (see Figure 1), who travelled in theregion in 1495 and 1505. At the end of theNapoleonic years, in 1815, the district ofTrentino (ruled by a Bishop-Prince sincethe early 11th century) was united with theCounty of Tyrol, under the rule of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, of which itremained part until the end of the FirstWorld War. Heavily affected by the war,the region and its capital town wereannexed to Italy in 1919. Probably the mostsignificant urban project in the city ofTrento was carried out in 1853–58, underthe Habsburgs Imperial rule, when the trajec-tory of the riverbed was changed. The ration-ale for this major public work was to preventfloods and facilitate the construction of theBrenner railway. According to RenatoBocchi (1989), before the re-routing of theriverbed, three key areas joined the river

Adige and the city: the productive area ofthe harbour, the picturesque view of thehigh houses facing the river in the boroughof San Martino and the protection gate atthe wooden San Lorenzo bridge. A fourtharea might be added, represented by thegardens of the aristocratic palaces alongStrada Longa (currently, via Manci) and thegranite promenade.

The re-routing of the riverbed produced arotation of the city by 908. In contemporaryTrento, the river no longer flows from eastto west but from north to south. Curiously,a similar 908 rotation of the imagined axis ofthe city also occurred, with major impact onurban development and the dwellers’ mentalmaps, in New York in the late 18th–early19th century, as detailed by urban historianThomas Bender (2002). Since this majortransformation, the city of Trento lost touchwith its river, which was confined to a mar-ginal position and surrounded by higherembankments. The flow became quickerand the look slightly similar to that of acanal; concurrently, several economic andsocial activities, which were previouslycarried on along the river, waned. The newlocation of the river was described aslacking historical meaning and ‘personality’(Salvotti, quoted in Bocchi, 1989). In short,it was a process of double ‘deterritorialisa-tion’: the river was deterritorialised fromthe city while, at the same time, the city wasdeterritorialised from its river.

Since that original rupture between the cityand its river, a number of attempts have beenmade to ‘reweave’ the lost relationship, or atleast to symbolically redress it. To take aminor but perhaps revealing anecdote: everyyear, during the Saint Patron’s celebrations(Saint Vigil) a fake, plastic tower is placedon the riverside (see Figure 2). This tower isshaped like the actually existing 15th-century Green Tower, which is in a differentpart of the city. The tower was indeed locatedalong the ancient river trace, but is far fromits present location. Another important andproblematic moment in the relationshipbetween the city of Trento and its river was

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the flood of 1966. As the whole city wasflooded with the water taking back its oldtrace, the river became associated with collec-tive trauma. After the flood, awkwardadditional barriers were built quickly. Itlooks as if the city wanted, in some sense, tobury its river. A sort of collective amnesiaabout the river followed, and indeed theriver disappears from both official andprivate visual documentation: very few pub-licly accessible pictures of the river weretaken during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Perhaps as a long-term effect of the 19th-century deterritorialisation and the 20th-century flood is that the city of Trento,unlike many other European riverfrontcities, has no facilities, shops, bars or clubslocated along the river. The appearance ofthe riverbank as an informal space, a ‘not(yet) planned’ territory is thus accentuated.The lack of an overall vision or a definiteplan for the tract of urban waterfront lasteduntil a project for redevelopment of a site for-merly occupied by a large industrial estab-lishment was launched. This occurred inconnection with major transformations ofthe city’s built environment since the late1990s, including the conversion of formerindustrial sites, former military installations

Figure 1 Durer’s view of Trento (1495)

Figure 2 Fake Green Tower (June 2010)

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and other abandoned sites (Winterle andFranceschini, 2010). The occasion soonturned into a veritable launch pad for the dis-course of ‘re-urbanising’ areas regarded as‘void’, ‘vacant’ and ‘marginal’—a discourseheralded by the municipality and, above all,the province administration. The project forthe renewal of the district, signed by thearchistar Renzo Piano is currently under con-struction. It was commissioned by a privategroup of developers, and mainly promotedby local banks, with only a formal partici-pation by the public administration. Theproject has become the major iconic invest-ment made by the city over the last 50 yearsand it foresees a mixed-use area, which ismainly residential, yet also inclusive of com-mercial activities, a green park and a newScience Museum (Bocchi, 2006).

Despite various controversies, the projectby Piano Workshop has been saluted byleading politicians, as well as several localobservers, as an unmistakable opportunityto redress the relationship of the city withboth its river and a district that had beensevered from the city centre by the railwayline. By means of iconic architecture (Sklair,2006), the Piano project can be said to bepart of the contemporary trend denouncedby Brenner et al. (2009, p. 176) as ‘profit-driven urbanization and its relentless com-modification and re-commodification ofurban spaces’. A discourse of urban ‘quality’through capitalisation strategies has domi-nated the public presentations of most ofthese projects, which has practically corre-sponded to the spatial removal of subjectsregarded as inappropriate and problematic.Questioning such politics of visibility, wehave sought to explore what is left out ofthe picture of the new master narrative.

Inside urban interstices

An urban interstice is usually defined as afunctionless leftover space, which resultsfrom heterogeneous elements in the builtenvironment or from discontinuous planning

acts (Tonnelat, 2008). The fact that a space isindicated as an ‘in-between’ presupposes thatit is regarded as ‘minor’ vis-a-vis other spacesthat surround or encircle it. Its ‘in-between-ness’ refers to the fact of being surroundedby other spaces that are either more insti-tutional, and therefore economically andlegally more powerful, or endowed with astronger identity, and therefore more recog-nisable or typical. Traditionally, intersticeshave been associated with wastelands andleftover spaces, as by-products of urban plan-ning, sheer unplanned margins (spazi dirisulta). While this is certainly the case, wealso suggest that such an image does notexhaust the notion of interstitiality. Thelatter cannot be reduced to its morphologicalcharacters, but also needs to take into accountthe type of urban events and the register ofsocial interaction unfolding in these spaces.

Our observation has led us to believe thateveryday urban practices in informal publicspaces contain an element of demand andaspiration that forms a sort of substratum ofurban expression, work-through and resist-ance. While, admittedly, our ethnographicobservation was not sufficiently extended tosupport definitive conclusions or claims, weadvance the hypothesis that social interactionin everyday locales can be read as expressionof an urban desire that manifests and materi-alises in the public domain. Far from beingempty, unplanned urban spaces do constitutea domain for imagination, reveries, subtrac-tion, events and encounters. Their relativelyunstructured nature represents a crucial pre-serve of informal sociality and an importantplace for the experience of socio-culturaldiversity. Urbanity—the nurturing of civicrespect and the emergence of solidarityamong strangers—is facilitated rather thanhampered by the loose nature of unplannedurban spaces. From this point of view,vacant spaces like an urban riverbank andother similar relatively low-tech environ-ments can also be understood in terms ofWalter Benjamin’s ‘urban pores’, whichconnect private, communal and public terri-tories in the city. While we agree with

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Amin (2008) that the classical values ofurbanity were forged in a historical contextthat is deeply different from our own—atime of increased mediatisation and urbandispersal—we argue that the contemporarycity is characterised by a persistent signifi-cance of immanent territorialities.

In our study, we attempted to understandthe material, physical and corporeal nature ofurban interstices by immersing ourselves intoone of them, in order to outline a sensory phe-nomenology of ‘being on the riverbank’. Bydoing so, we have attempted to frame socialinteraction within its most immediate material-ity and its sensorial plenum. The urbanenvironment is made up of a combination oflight, atmosphere, weather, mood and affect;it is a sensuous environment made of concen-trations, colours, noises, smells and a certain‘air’. The riverbank appears as a small world,which looks somehow isolated and ‘apart’from the rest of the city, even while it is rightin the middle of it. An interstice is, in fact, asort of ‘periphery in the middle’. The firstthing that one finds are small paths (seeFigure 3), trails made by the footsteps ofthose who walked there before us. Onecannot but follow the trail, which gives astrong directionality—a trajectory. Direction-ality is the very peculiarity of riverfronts, incomparison, for example, with seafronts. Inthis sense, Canetti (1960, §I, 24, 4) reflectedon the river as an ‘imperfect’ crowd symbol:

‘Rivers are especially a symbol for the timewhen the crowd is forming, the time before ithas attained what it will attain. Rivers lack thecontagiousness of fire and the universality ofthe sea. But, in place of these, they have animpetus which seems inexhaustible and which,because there is never a time when it is notbeing fed, is present from the beginning.’ (83)

Sansot (2009 [1983], p. 148) observed thatrivers escape the usual dualism betweenmobility and immobility that dominates ourunderstanding of the relationship betweenlandscape and action. Similar places couldthus be venues for what Chatterton (2010)has recently called the ‘urban impossible’,

an aspiration to the city that, to our mind,expresses itself not only through consciouslyclaimed visions advocated by social move-ments, but also through the largely dispersed,uncoordinated and in most cases unconsciouspractices of everyday encounter.

As one walks along the riverbank, one cangradually discover and absorb the environ-ment. The experience of being in a uniqueplace—in fact, the unique place of the here-and-now—possesses an immersive nature; itis an experience that Tim Ingold (2000),drawing from phenomenology, has proposedto capture through his ‘dwelling perspective’.Ingold (2005) employs the notion of ‘illumi-nation’ to explain that the sky, the light andthe weather are not surfaces that we can seebut rather mediums in which we see. The riv-erbank forms an immersive environment:

Figure 3 The path (October 2009)

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before forming any type of bounded terri-tory, it is a zone of intensity, a world madeof canes, wind and water reflexes, in a conti-nuity of heterogeneous connections. Whileplanners have treated the riverbank merelyas an object, we cannot really understand itwithout appreciating its ‘immersiveness’. Ina calm afternoon of September, one musinglysaunters on crisp leaves, in the sweet smell offermentation; then, on a sunny day in April,one scrambles against the fresh gusts ofwind, blinking in the light that fills thescene. At an uncertain hour of the day, thelivid light of twilight becomes chilling.

As a landscape—better, a waterscape—theriverbank is not a mere ‘surrounding’ butalso endowed with its specific temporality(Ingold, 2000, §11). It has its pace andrhythm, its breath and heartbeat, its way ofunfolding and becoming. One finds traces inthe grass, holes, nests and dens of littleanimals. The fluidity of water, the whirls inits flow, have the same dynamic of daytimereveries. For Bachelard (1985 [1942]), evenbefore extension, water is characterised bydepth. On the riverbank, the eye alwaysends up meeting some unexpected, scatteredfind; turning around, one may be surprisedby the length of one’s own shadow on theground. Thus, walking along the river predis-poses us—in measure proportional to thelength and ‘depth’ of our stroll—to thedreamlike encounters of childhood, likethose of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind inthe Willows (1908).

In addition, the riverbank is a stream ofregional territory (along with its originalrural activities: pastures, agriculture, wildlife)that enters the city and pierces it from end toend. The river enters urban space and shapesit as a landscape. It will be no surprise to findseasonal passages of flocks during the Alpinetranshumance, that is, the ancient practicemoving the livestock to highlands insummer and back to lowlands in winter.Yet, such a space is not detached from therest of everyday urban space: observing howinhabitants actually make use of it, we soonrealised that the riverbank is an espace

souple, a loose or floating space, sometimeseven a precarious one.

Everyday encounters

As every other urban territory, the riverbankfollows daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms.As for seasonal cycles in Trento, remarkableevents include the annual ‘traditionalist–revivalist’ festival, the Celebrazioni Vigiliane,and the more locally based and popular Festadi Sant’Apollinare in the Piedicastelloborough, located on the side of the riveropposite the city centre (see Figure 4).During these celebrations, people throng toenjoy canoe and towboat races: the riverbankis transformed into an official public place forcelebration and, possibly, more people visit itin a single day than during the rest of the year.Alongside the two major scheduled celebra-tions, the riverbank is the scene for anumber of activities, ranging from sports topromenading. Documentation of historicaluses suggests that in the past the range ofuses was even wider than today and encom-passed practical daily duties such as laundrydrying (see Figure 5). Today, after mosthousehold activities have been moved intoprivate spaces, the use of the riverbank terri-tory has become mainly recreational: peoplewith dogs and children are the mostcommon presence as are those engaging insporting activities such as jogging, cyclingand occasionally even horse-riding. Theseactivities follow seasonal rhythms, as doesfishing, which on certain Sundays of Aprilmay turn into group entertainment (seeFigure 6).

Another rather classic yet interestingobservation concerns how people use publicplaces’ equipment, such as benches, in non-conventional ways. Looking back at picturestaken by the great French humanist photogra-pher Willy Ronis on the embankment of theSeine in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s,we were struck by the similarities betweenthe ‘improper’ or creative uses of public furni-ture in two such different places: in both

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contexts we found elderly people sitting onbenches on the ‘reverse’ side, that is, facingthe waterfront (see Figures 7 and 8). Similarly,we observed how young people appropriatepublic space in a variety of creative ways,not the least because they have to circumventcontrols and official rules over the permitted

uses of space set by adults (see Figures 9 and10). These small and apparently trivial impro-visations, to our mind, reveal somethingabout the very nature of public space andthe presence in it of a multiplicity of min-orities, as we will see in the concludingsection.

Figure 5 Drying laundry(Photo: F.lli Pedrotti, 1930s)

Figure 4 St Vigil’s celebrations (June 2010)

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Walking along the riverbank, we met manydifferent types of people. Since Trento is asmall city and one in which both of us haveworked for several years, we expected that

sooner or later we would bump intosomeone we knew. In fact, such meetings didnot occur so frequently. More interesting,however, were our meetings with the type ofpeople social psychologist Stanley Milgram(1977) once called the ‘familiar strangers’,that is, people you don’t personally knowbut whose face is familiar due to recurrentcrossings-by. The familiar stranger is famousfor creating the embarrassing situation inwhich people look elsewhere because theydo not know how to behave with eachother—Milgram even hypothesised that onlyin the exceptional case of a catastrophewould familiar strangers finally admit thatthey know each other, start talking andtaking care of each other. However, evenwithout the help of catastrophes, on theriverbank the familiar stranger finally feltlike saying hallo, albeit at a distance (seeFigure 11).

The familiar stranger provides an illus-tration of riverbank sociality, but in fact,most important is the case of the unfamiliarstranger. It has been clear since classical soci-ology that, as an outsider to the private andparochial realms, the stranger is a crucialfigure of the urban public realm (Brighenti,2010). Following Jacobs, Goffman and

Figure 7 Sitting on the bench on the Seine(Photo: Willy Ronis, 1950s)

Figure 6 Fishing (April 2010)

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others, urban scholars like Richard Sennett(1977) have explained that the public realmis founded precisely on the capacity ofpeople to interact with strangers, to accept

and understand them despite, or even byvirtue of, the fact that they are not personalacquaintances, correligionaries or membersof the same ethnic community. Morerecently, in the North-American context,Low et al. (2005) have showed how theunrestrained quest for urban security has ledto the exclusion of ‘unwanted’ subjects andto the consequent reduction of social and cul-tural diversity tolerated in public places.Similar trends have also been amply docu-mented in Europe (see, e.g. Delgado Ruiz,2011). In our study, we observed thatmigrants and minority populations ingeneral are amongst the most active and crea-tive users of this public space. Minoritygroups’ outdoor sociality might be due to anumber of causes that we have not specifi-cally investigated here—ranging, for instance,from worse lodging conditions and lack ofprivate meeting places, through weaker localsocial networks, a much more positive, confi-dent and less paranoid way of being in an‘exposed’ situation, as well as a desire toassert their right to the city. We noticedmigrant and minority group memberssitting on the riverbank after work, talkingto each other, having a drink together (bring-ing bottles they bought in supermarkets) and

Figure 9 Lovers on the Seine(Photo: Willy Ronis, 1950s)

Figure 8 Sitting on the bench on the Adige (November 2009)

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sometimes having picnics with friends ortheir family as a crucial presence in this space.

Finally, the riverbank is also a place wherehomeless people, who are increasinglyremoved from the sanitised historic centreof the city, can find shelter and temporarilysettle (especially during spring andsummer). An entire politics of visibility and

invisibility (i.e. invisibilisation) unfoldswith regards to marginal subjects, classifiedas ‘undesirable’ and ‘problematic’ by poli-ticians and the media. As the historic centreis increasingly sterilised and discursivelyrepresented as a ‘sacred’ space, the rhetoricof a threatened urban decay is deployed as atool to justify exclusion and removal of

Figure 11 Greetings from the familiar stranger (April 2010)

Figure 10 Lovers on the Adige (November 2009)

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subjects classified as a ‘danger’ to the publicspace.

Conclusions

In our exploration of the riverbank, weobserved a number of instances of whatMattias Karrholm (2007) has called ‘territor-ial associations’:

‘the object of territorial association representsan identifiable area, characterised by a certainusage and those specific conventions andregularities that underpin this usage. Theseareas do not necessarily have to be consideredby any person or group as “their own”, butare nevertheless associated by others aspertaining to a certain function or category ofusers.’ (p. 441)

The lack of major landmarks such as monu-ments or other symbolic territorial markersalong the riverbank we observed, has left ascope for implicit and soft territorial associ-ations, through which different types ofpopulations come close to each other, whileleaving space for the unfolding of others’activities (see Figure 12).

Such a fluid practical territorial productionthrough use does not indicate an absence oflocal, unwritten rules for the use of space.Informal social control is, after all, an integralpart of what constitutes the feeling of safetyin public. However, in general, the riverbankappears as an everyday space that is neitherprivatised nor communitarian, or ‘parochial’(Lofland, 1998). So while, as argued by Lowet al. (2005), to foster urban spaces, it isnecessary to accommodate the differences inthe ways social classes and ethnic groupsuse and value public sites, our observationof a tract of loose and largely unplannedurban riverbank suggests that one shouldalso be wary of the danger of the planninghubris leading to the creation of domesticatedand formalised spaces for the encountering ofdifferences. On the contrary, the ‘modest’,largely unequipped and unfurnished territorywe have observed reminds us that all placemaking and all territory making begins ‘inthe middle of things’, in an interstitialsituation.

Complementarily, this also suggests that,during major processes of urban transform-ation such as waterfront renewal projects,the presence of planning and architectural

Figure 12 Territorial associations (April 2010)

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direction (in French, maıtrise d’œuvre) andproject management (maıtrise d’ouvrage)alone is not sufficient. Rather, something likea maıtrise d’œuvre sociologique, a notiondeveloped in particular by Tonnelat andRenaud (2008), could provide a useful tool toreveal the public (which in a restrictive and dis-torted sense is usually referred to as the ‘stake-holders’) that will be affected by ongoingprojects, helping to produce a social subjectcapable of imagining shared space. In turn,this could lead, as Tonnelat and Renaudargue, to the recognition of a veritable maıtrised’usage, which refers to the capacity of usersthemselves to constitute territories and thenecessity of fully recognising them as a thirdactive pole of territorial transformationbeyond designers and project managers.

Urban public space cannot be adequatelyunderstood if studied in abstraction. Itsidiographic characteristics, its contingent,material, historical and phenomenologicalaspects make it understandable as a commonpublic domain (Brighenti, 2010). Our sensoryexploration of a small tract of urban riverbank,and our focused attention to its rhythms, uses,rituals, adjustments and meanings, seems tosuggest that the public domain always entailsa coefficient of ‘deterritorialisation’ that setsin motion the private and parochial realms.In fact, such a deterritorialisation is not thenegation of territories; rather, it representsa crucial component that multiplies andpluralises territories. Urban territories are con-stantly created by such acts in which an addressto a non-intimate public is made (Iveson,2007). In this context, we have recalled abovethe crucial presence of the familiar and theunfamiliar stranger. Planning has extremelypowerful effects in shaping the possibilitiesand impossibilities of the encounter, that is,of making the public address actual. But, as acaveat against the perils of the planninghubris, we invite to look below the thresholdof visibility of new master narratives in orderto fully appreciate the sensory, populated(peopled), dense life of urban interstices. Farfrom being a rejection of planning, ours isessentially an invitation to acknowledge the

richness of modest territories and theirphenomenal qualities for the potentially unfin-ished nature of the public domain, that is, aspotential reservoirs of emancipatory forms ofurbanism.

Acknowledgements and Permissions

The authors wish to thank the editors andtwo anonymous editorial reviewers fortheir helpful comments on a previousversion of this paper. Thanks also toRenato Bocchi and Roberto Degasperi forinspiration to visually explore Trento’s riv-erbanks. Willy Ronis’ photographs aretaken from W. Ronis and N. Simsolo,Willy Ronis: lungo il fiume delle domeniche(Milano: Federico Motta, 1994). Authorshave made their best to obtain permissionsto reproduce these images. The picture bythe Pedrotti brothers is reproduced withpermission from Club Fotoamatori Mattar-ello (eds) Sulla riva del fiume (exhibitioncatalogue, Trento, 2009). Durer’s watercolour is available under CreativeCommons licence. All other pictures are #

by the Authors. Photos can be foundonline at: http://www.mediafire.com/?bgijat1adp1qid8

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