Lauded and criticised in equal measure, some suggest meanwhile uses prompts developer-driven gentrification and subsequent social displacement. Others celebrate the transfer of property assets to ordinary communities, however temporary. 

The tensions associated with urban wasteland sites, their divergent stakeholders, and their transformations can appear both irreconcilable and inevitable, endemic to the systems of global capital that drive contemporary urban forms. Our image trilogy captures this messy complexity. Image 1 ‘opportunity’ invokes the productive tension between the temporary and the permanent within the terrain vague, where traces of human life, and the promise of future communities spark our imagination. Image 2 ‘production’ conveys the apparent myth of progress and the tensions between commerce and community which arise when sanctioned meanwhile uses and their communities are replaced by (sometimes unsuccessful) speculative commercial development. Image 3 ‘infinite consumption’ invokes the cyclical realities of urban redevelopment stemming from the capitalist processes of investment and de-investment over time — processes that, ironically, produce the eventual return of terrain vague, positively, or otherwise.