About the Book
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.
Table of 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.
About the Author :
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).
Review :
This is an excellent book. The author combines an analysis of the complex narratives and policy rhetoric surrounding the temporary uses of urban space, with an in-depth ethnographic observation of practices of temporary use and their perceptions by various stakeholders. She embeds the London field work in contemporary debates and recent scholarship from urban and cultural geography, urban studies, architectural and planning studies, in a perceptive and refined manner, leading to powerful conclusions about the ambiguous role of temporary uses of space in a post-austerity, neoliberal city where precarious forms of living and working have become dominant.'-Professor Claire Colomb, The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London
