With the coining of the term Terrain Vague, Ignasi de Solà-Morales describes a form of absence in the contemporary metropolis.
“It is impossible to captate in a single English word or phrase the meaning of French terrain vague.
In French, the term terrain has a more urban quality than the English land, so that we must note here that terrain is in the first instance an extension of the precisely limited round, fit for construction, of the city. If i am not mistaken, however, the evolution in English of the same word terrain has given it more agricultural or geological meanings. At the same time, the French word terrain also refers to lager and perhaps less precisely defined areas of territory, connected with the physical idea of a portion of land in its expectant state, potentially axploitable but already possessing some kind of definition in its property to which we are external.”
Terrain vague aren’t places to look giving them a negative connotation, rather as part of an urban organism in constantly evolving, often born with a very precise function, but ready to adapt to new uses, following and participating in new mechanisms of transformation of the city.