Terrain Vague Ecologies
Editorial and Computational Cartographies for Post-Industrial landscapes
Recognising Vacancy
Ignasi de Solà-Morales asked how photography could reveal the spaces left outside the accelerated logic of the contemporary city.
His terrain vague was never simply an abandoned site. It was an interval — a place where multiple temporalities, memories and possibilities remained suspended.
Three decades later, many of those sites have disappeared beneath redevelopment, regeneration and speculative urbanism.
Yet another question has become increasingly urgent.
How do we recognise vacancy today?
Vacancy is not merely an empty site waiting to be occupied. As Eunsong Kim argues through Cheryl Harris's notion of whiteness as property, vacancy is actively produced through political, legal and aesthetic operations that render territories available for appropriation. What appears empty is often the result of abstraction: histories, labour, ecologies and communities are systematically removed from view.
This understanding shaped One Green Eye, the Other Blue: Herbarium of the Anthropocene, where the abandoned industrial landscapes of Campanhã (Porto) were approached not simply as ruins, but as territories continually reinscribed through the logic of vacancy, speculation and aestheticisation.
Terrain Vague Ecologies extends this investigation.
It asks how vacancy might be recognised across different regimes of observation.
Photography.
Walking.
Editorial cartography.
Botanical fieldwork.
Computational vision.
Artificial intelligence.
A Computational Ecology of Vacancy
Photography, walking, editorial cartography, botanical fieldwork, and computational vision each contribute a distinct way of perceiving relationships between plants, ruins, infrastructures, archives and urban transformation. Together, they compose an expanded ecology of observation.
Where is the terrain vague?
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How does vacancy become visible?
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What forms of perception make that visibility possible?
The project explores artificial intelligence not as an image generator but as a method of research.
A visual corpus assembled from Solà-Morales' original photographic references, historical documentation and contemporary photographs produced during collective walks becomes a dataset through which computational models establish their own visual relationships.
The objective is not to automate interpretation.
It is to expand it.
Machine learning becomes another participant in the investigation, capable of identifying visual continuities, botanical recurrences and spatial affinities that complement human observation.
The resulting maps do not replace critical reading.
They open new editorial territories.
Terrain Vague Ecologies asks not only where the terrain vague survives, but how vacancy continues to be produced, perceived and contested. Through photography, walking, plants, publishing and computational vision, the project investigates how different forms of observation reveal different geographies of absence — and different possibilities for imagining what might still emerge there.
An editorial research project by paula roush / msdm
developed between Porto, Barcelona and Lisbon
through photography, computational cartography and publishing.
Research Structure
01 Reading
The first outcome of this investigation is an editorial cartography derived from Solà-Morales' essay.
This conceptual cartography translates the essay into a computational field of relationships.
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Open publication
02 Walking
Barcelona.
Rephotography.
Terrain vague.
Urban vegetation.
Field-based Impressions
(such as cyanotype).
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03 Generating
Hybrid herbariums.
Computational cartographies.
Visual embeddings.
Machine perception.
Editorial publishing.
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