Liminal Spaces and Theorising the Permanence of Transience

Abstract

Global capital continually and consistently ruptures our cities, affecting change and introducing challenges relating to how the spatial form is both manifested and mediated. Space is becoming increasingly transient, and it is questionable whether any urban landscapes can be considered permanent today. Ongoing adjustments in our multifarious and disparate built environment give rise to antagonisms and conflict particularly focused on the lived experience of temporalities. What was permanent can become temporary and marginal; what was temporary can become permanent, reflecting myriad relationships and conflicts, including localised activism, political mobilisation and the influence of the national state. The influx of capital into cities in pursuit of profit maximisation under neoliberalism gives rise to an urban form which is experienced and lived, yet illusory and detached, as we experience shifting spatialities in independent and contrasting ways. Our urban form is altering at pace, but how can we conceptualise these changes with a sense of time? To this end, research into uneven spatial change from the perspective of communities, localised action and national governance is theorised through the concepts of liminality and temporality. We understand liminal spaces to be transitional and in-between. These spaces are examined through the work of critical social theorists, such as Lefebvre and Foucault. A duo of urban experiences is interpreted through case studies reflecting spaces of deprivation, including the emergence of food banks in the UK generally and specific localised changes in an Edinburgh neighbourhood, which represent ‘transient spatialities’. The issue to be addressed is the social form of these transient spatialities, the value of such spaces and how they are affected by the varied temporalities experienced with the urban