Full Description
Temporary urbanism has become a distinctive feature of urban life after the 2008 global financial crisis. This book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration policies and planning. Drawing on seven years of semi-ethnographic research, it explores the politics of temporariness from a situated analysis of neighbourhood transformation, media representations and wider political and cultural shifts in austerity London. Through a longitudinal engagement with projects and practitioners, the book tests the power of aesthetic and cultural interventions and highlights tensions between the promise of vacant space re-appropriation and its commodification. Against the normalisation of ephemerality, it presents a critique of the permanence of temporary urbanism as a glamorisation of the anticipatory politics of precarity which are transforming cities, subjectivities and imaginaries of urban action.
Contents
Chapter 1. Temporary urbanism: a situated approach,Reclaiming spaces and the role of temporariness, The trope of temporariness as 'alterity', For a situated approach to temporary urbanism, 'Post-crisis' London, The book's questions, Chapter 2. The entangled field of temporary urbanism, The emergence of a discourse, Countering recessional perceptions, 'Creative' fillers,Art showcasing to the world: pop-up in the shadow of the 2012 Games, The rise of the pop-up intermediary, Meanwhilers: a clever rebranding, The Meanwhile London Competition, Enrolling urban professionals in the shift to austerity, The unresolved question of unlawful occupations, Conclusion: the primacy of property, Chapter 3. 'Not a pop-up!',The experience of performers and visual artists, A well-established history, 'Provided you can beg, steal or borrow a space', Group+Work and 1990s myths in public commissioning, Pop-ups in Westminster, ArtEvict in 'forgotten spaces', Settling down in Hackney Wick Fish Island? Pop-up spaces as festivals and digital arts incubators, Conclusions: in the cracks of the creative city promise, Chapter 4. Staging temporary spaces, Experiential economies and the performativity of urban activation, The Elephant as a site for 'community engagement', Studio at the Elephant, A strategy of open programming, Visibility for recognition, Mediating face-to-face interactions,Empowerment for surrender? Conclusions: the openness of agonistic encounters, Chapter 5. Planning a temporary city of on-demand communities, Temporariness in planning at times of austerity, 'Stitching the fringes' before and after the Olympics, Learning from Others: interim uses as urban 'testing sites', Vacant land and setting up a temporary community hub, Young people and the 'two communities', Risky grassroots, Temporary 'urban vitality' in the LLDC Local Plan (2015-2031), 'Seeding' long-term uses,Learning to become 'on-demand communities', Conclusions: the risk of planned precarization, Chapter 6. The normalisation of temporariness, Underused spaces as a 'problem', The projective logic, Ephemeral architectures, Permanent 'times of uncertainty', Tactical or precarious acting? Precarity as temporal foreclosure, Conclusion: reclaiming urban space-time after the pop up, Index, Bibliography.
