The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism

The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism

Normalising Precarity in Austerity London

  • Author: Ferreri, Mara
  • Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
  • Serie: Cities and Cultures
  • eISBN Pdf: 9789048535828
  • Place of publication:  Amsterdam , Netherlands
  • Year of digital publication: 2021
  • Month: March
  • Pages: 194
  • Language: English
Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on seven years of semi-ethnographic research in London, it explores the politics of temporariness at time of austerity from a situated analysis of neighbourhood transformation and wider cultural and economic shifts. Through a sympathetic, longitudinal engagement with projects and practitioners, the book tests the power of aesthetic and cultural interventions and highlights tensions between the promise of practices of dissenting vacant space re-appropriation, and their practical foreclosure. Against the normalisation of ephemerality, it develops a critique of temporary urbanism as a glamorisation of the anticipatory politics of precarity, transforming subjectivities and imaginaries of urban action.
  • Cover
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • 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
    • Bibliography
  • 2. The entangled field of temporary urbanism
    • The emergence of a discourse
    • Countering recessional perceptions
    • ‘Creative’ fillers
    • Art showcasing to the world: pop-ups 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
    • Conclusions: the primacy of property
    • Bibliography
  • 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
    • Bibliography
  • 4. Staging temporary spaces
    • Experiential economies and the performativity of urban activation
    • Staging ‘pop-up shops’ in the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre
    • 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
    • Bibliography
  • 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 grassroot
    • 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 precarisation
    • Bibliography
  • 6. The normalisation of temporariness
    • Underused spaces as a ‘problem’
    • The projective logic
    • Ephemeral architectures
    • Urban festivalisation and labour precarity
    • Permanent times of uncertainty
    • Tactical or precarious acting?
    • Precarity as temporal foreclosure
    • Reclaiming urban space-time after the pop-up
    • Bibliography
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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