During the XX. century a series of technological, cultural as well as scientific developments have profoundly changed the way we live. For example: the explosion of the privatized transportation sector, made possible by the development of extensive integrated, mostly publicly funded road networks all over the world, together with the adoption of the cold chain and other developments profoundly changed the way we acquire food. While during a long time the city has been a place, where different kinds of food were not only consumed but also processed. Today these functions have been relocated to remote areas, far away and hidden from sight.

Because of this displacement the question arose for public authorities and society as a whole, how to deal with all those areas inside the city, which had been built on public ground and had lost their function. The research project ‘Alternative Lots’ follows this question through the comparative analysis of several urban redevelopment projects. The cases of the urban projects of Parc de la Villette in Paris, the Matadero in Madrid and the Deutschherrnufer in Frankfurt are object of a comparative study, which analysis the redevelopment process as well as the performance of the resulting intervention. A detailed photographic essay documenting each case is combined with interviews and the description and analysis of the urban morphologies, which characterize each case. Effective strategies of architectural, urban and landscape transformation are devised on this basis.

This research is part of the research programme ‘Cities in Cities’.