The notion of "leftover space" has always been of great interest
to architects, but in the context of global urbanization it
conjures a particularly visceral response. Leftover space””in
the sense of being ghettoized and depicting a sort of bare
essentiality of being in architecture””is not always easy to
look at much less understand, especially for a profession whose
responsibility is designing the structures that people will
inhabit. For the most part, the issue of global poverty is
translated through viral images of shanties infecting the
landscape, peripheral slums leaching off the urban core, and
pictures that instill fear of an assailant rise of diseased
squatter cities. This not only demonizes the third world, it
painfully reminds us of our own failures to address the
infrastructural necessities of millions. However, these images
narrate only part of the story for those who go on sifting
through the remains of an urban evolution which has long since
abandoned them. Wes Janz , an architect teaching at B