Urban vacancy: mapping the European research landscape
Authors
Bas van Heur
Keywords:
vacancy, urban and regional development, collective agency, public policy
Abstract
Although still a niche within established disciplines, research on urban vacancy has boomed in recent decades, with different research communities investigating different dimensions of vacancy. However, these communities rarely communicate with each other, leading to parallel debates, different conceptual vocabularies and diverging empirical foci. This becomes particularly problematic in the current era, which is best characterised not simply as an ‘urban age’, but as one in which city regions find themselves at the heart of economic, ecological and societal crises that are reshaping our world. Vacant spaces can be understood as symptoms of these crises, but also as actually existing and potential sites for experimentation, prefiguring new and more sustainable ways of urban living. The current paper offers a mapping and review of research publications and projects across Europe, identifying similarities and differences between regions with regard to research output, empirical foci and theoretical concerns. Cutting across different research domains, the paper concludes by proposing an integrated and interdisciplinary European research agenda on urban vacancy.
van Heur, B. (2025). Urban vacancy: mapping the European research landscape. European Journal of Spatial Development, 22(1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15654936
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