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.

Mara Ferreri is an urban and cultural geographer. She has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and is currently a Vice Chancellor Research Fellow in Human Geography at Northumbria University.

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