Despite a tremendous amount of knowledge on urban disruptions, divides are proliferating. In situations involving complexity and uncertainty, where an urgency for intervention is felt and yet a clear response is not apparent, we know that "we cannot solve the problems with the same kind of thinking that created them" (Einstein). Some other levels of perception and understanding need to be mobilized for formulating sensible responses. The present contribution is investigating possible postures to situate oneself as an architect at the interstice of physical, imagined and lived space (Lefevre), where tactics of displacement introducing play into the design process generate gaps which in turn could become productive. The triadic spatiality can reveal both, a distance and a continuity between what is physically there, what is enunciated and what is being done. In the research project, what might appear as incoherence experienced in a territory, in organizations as well as in each one individually, is taken as a productive gap. From that productive gap containing action tendencies (N.Frijda) a situation can be put into motion. In this sense, just as any living organism, a city has emotions appearing in interaction with a milieu. Two experiences from professional practice are investigated, wherein aspects related to displacement in its active form "to displace" and its passive form, "to be displaced", are tested. The processes of production of space are redrawn after the realization of spatial prototypes in order to grasp the pattern how ideas, actions, material transformations and decisions emerge. In both research actions, the relevance of situation and of first-person experience can be observed. It became evident, how taking place physically amongst stakeholders in the place itself, with material anchors, is important to drive the process. These material anchors provoke the opening of productive gaps on individual, interrelation and territorial scale, they stimulate moments of creativity and simultaneously, they hold the process together, contain the dynamics in an object, explicating and driving the shifts.