Shanghai’s metropolitan thoroughfares and side streets, the unsettled roads of Middle Eastern cities, and peripheral districts neglected by architects and planners form the terrain of Gabriele Basilico: Spaces in Between. The book gathers mostly unpublished photographs made between 1985 and 2011, bringing several decades of Basilico’s sustained attention to urban space into a single volume.

Basilico is concerned less with the city as an inventory of landmarks than with the relationships that make it intelligible: between structures and open ground, movement and stillness, central routes and marginal areas. Expansive views accommodate numerous simultaneous events and spatial contradictions. Particular architectural elements serve as thresholds into the photographs, guiding the eye through layered scenes rather than offering an immediate, definitive subject.

This approach depends upon duration. Basilico asks the viewer to look at the measured pace with which a photographer first encounters and absorbs a place. Order is not imposed by simplifying the city; it emerges gradually from close observation of environments that may initially appear uncertain or fragmented. Across locations and years, the photographs establish a comparative study of how metropolitan life occupies, organizes, and continually redefines space.

Published by Skira Editore in 2022, the 160-page book follows a project exhibited at the Museo Civico Castello Ursino in Catania from September 2021 to January 2022. For collectors attentive to architectural photography and the representation of changing cities, its significance rests in the breadth of its chronology, the inclusion of largely unseen work, and the clarity with which it articulates Basilico’s slow, analytical method. It is a concentrated account of an urban practice shaped not by spectacle, but by patient reading of the spaces through which cities reveal their internal coherence.