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“Terrain vague” is a French term with multiple layers of meaning:  the roots of the word “vague” suggest “empty, unoccupied” yet also “free, available, unengaged (Sola-Morales 119).”  Sola-Morales describes how these spaces, often defined in the negative (“empty,” “unoccupied,”) can also be viewed as full—full of possibility, promise, and freedom.  Sola-Morales writes:


Perhaps we are drawn to these spaces because they reflect our own sense of alienation and marginality, as well as a desire to escape the dominant system of power and its spatial organization: “the urban order calls to the indefiniteness of the terrain vague (Sola-Morales 121).” Sola-Morales also relates our fascination with these places to a persistent Romantic sensibility that values memories of a lost past. This sensibility is present in those who would view Detroit as an illustration of the lost glory of America’s industrial age. These places make us reflect on the awe-inspiring speed of change in the modern world: Sola-Morales writes that terrains vagues conjure up despair for ”the speed with which the whole world is transformed” (Sola-Morales 122).

“What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition? Art’s reaction... is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces, strangers to the productive efficiency of the city... The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces– expectant, imprecise, fluctuating–transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front of the world, in front of our city, before ourselves.
In this situation the role of the architect is inevitably problematic. Architecture’s destiny has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal. In essence, architecture acts as an instrument of organization, of rationalization, and of productive efficiency capable of transforming the uncivilized into the cultivated, the fallow into the productive, the void into the built.
When architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, they seem incapable of doing anything other than introducing violent transformations, changing estrangement into citizenship, and striving at all costs to dissolve the uncontaminated magic of the obsolete in the realism of efficacy (Sola-Morales 122-123).”