The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism

Normalising Precarity in Austerity London
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-94-6298-491-2
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 8, 194 Seiten, Format (B × H): 241 mm x 161 mm, Gewicht: 458 g

Reihe: Cities and Cultures

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ferreri, Mara

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Regional- & Raumplanung Stadtplanung, Kommunale Planung
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziale Ungleichheit, Armut, Rassismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Wohnen & Obdachlosigkeit
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Ferreri, Mara
Mara Ferreri is an urban and cultural geographer. She is VC Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University, UK, and is the co-author of Notes from the Temporary City (Public Works, 2016).