Abstract
This article rethinks processes and practices of urban temporariness in a more agile, localised and context-specific way, where rhythms and dynamics of the everyday are clearly acknowledged. It discusses the directions of research required to theorise ‘temporary urbanisms’. To do so, three overlapping literatures are used: Lefebvrian conceptualisations of rhythms and the everyday; evolutionary analyses of path of change and path creation; and geographies of architecture. This article recognises that although temporariness is (evidently) a universal urban condition, diverse discursive and practical dynamics exist directing urban temporariness along particular channels and shaping space significantly while impacting people’s living environments.
Highlights
Analysing urban environments is an incredibly complex task as it involves deconstructing various temporal and spatial dynamics affecting people and spaces
We aim to develop the three theoretical strands behind our reinterpretation of temporary urbanisms: we draw initially upon Lefebvre’s work to focus on everyday uses and rhythms shaping people and spaces; we extend evolutionary economic geography and approaches to path creation and path of change to account for the transformation processes led by temporary urbanisms; we turn to scholarship on geographies of architecture to scrutinise the built forms, infrastructures and forms of knowledge associated with diverse forms of temporary urbanisms and their related meanings and materialities
This leads us to our final point of how processes of activation, adaptability and the trajectory of change of temporary urbanisms sit within a wider system of thinking about urban transformations
Summary
Analysing urban environments is an incredibly complex task as it involves deconstructing various temporal and spatial dynamics affecting people and spaces. There is a lack of a systematic conceptual language that can embrace the diversity of temporary uses and could help urban scholars better understand and unwrap complex and multi-temporal built environments, with a view to better articulating everyday dynamics with the wider social and economic process of urban placemaking (shaped around a vision for the future). To address these lacunae, this article aims to rethink processes and practices of urban temporariness in a more agile, localised and context-specific way, where rhythms and dynamics of the everyday are more clearly acknowledged. This line of research has involved qualitative, often ethnographic research with over 300 children and young people (aged 8–25), plus over 100 other stakeholders including children’s families, community leaders, local and national policymakers and private developers
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