Use: Term to be used to refer to issues related with complex aspects of the urban regeneration process that create negative externalities without a clear diagnostic / solution / data collection and KPI selection process.

Definition: If someone has a blind spot about something, they ignore it or they are unwilling or unable to understand it (Source: Oxford Dictionary).

In a recent piece in CITY, Stuart Hodkinson (2012) drew on John Holloway’s anatomy of ‘crack capitalism’ to think about urban struggles against new enclosures – the catalogue of privatizations, evictions, dispossessions and lockdowns of sites (housing, open land, infrastructure, public spaces and services) that once were held or used in public or in common. Forcing open the cracks in these contexts involves identifying the weaknesses, the joins, the blind spots and inconsistencies in a given strategy or settlement, and working both against and within them. The metaphor of the crack takes on material form as a marginal urbanism that goes to work on edges and in tight spaces in the lacerated cities of austerity economies. Crack capitalism, that is to say, has its spatial expression in an interstitial urbanism, as captured in Petcou and Petrescu’s (2007, 104) reworking of that older formulation about scalar politics with the new exhortation: ‘agir intersitiel’. (See source)