Everyday Urbanism: Rescuing 'Orphan Spaces'

"...The wedges of pavement squeezed along a highway on-ramp, the slips of unkempt grass, uncovered and then forgotten when one building replaced another, have become a rallying point...

[Everyday urbanism] is a non-utopian, non-idealistic, bottom-up approach to city-building that emphasizes small efforts over grand gestures. It lets people in a community give shape to its design. And it seeks to make cities, and the lives lived within them, better in tiny increments, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, rather than through attempts at cure-alls.

...It's a space left, literally, in between, uncared for and unclaimed. It is also the kind of site that, with a little creative ingenuity and political will, could quickly relinquish its position among the endless examples of small-scale blight, and instead offer hope.

Tiny gestures, everyday urbanism says, make a difference."