Temporality

Abstract

What is it that defines certain transformations of urban spaces as ‘temporary’ or ‘tactical’, and what gives these designations fresh validity and value? This chapter draws upon ideas and methods from Assemblage Thinking and Actor-Network Theory to focus on the role of temporariness as an actor that shapes the processes and outcomes of urban development. It draws on recent scholarship that explores various definitions, perceptions and roles for time in relation to the production and use of the urban environment. The analysis shows how temporariness defines, encourages and enables specific sets of relationships to the many actors, forces and interests that shape cities. Before, during and after the existence of a ‘temporary use’, people, money, regulations and materials are won over to it. Temporariness avoids and withstands challenges. It adapts, developing its own assets, needs, allies and logic. These dynamics are explored in terms of various benefits and impacts that temporary urbanism can have for other actors and a variety of ways that it links to longer-lasting forms of urban development. This characterisation of temporary urbanism and its networks of interdependence links it to wider critiques of Neoliberalism, Modernist master planning, and historic preservation: broad social constructs that themselves each embody and sustain particular understandings of time, building and cities. This examination of today's temporary urbanism highlights two paradoxical and countervailing dynamics that constantly influence the form of cities. First, temporary urbanism, for all its claimed ephemerality and fluidity, constantly establishes new, durable relationships and has broad and enduring effects. Second, all urban spaces are more or less impermanent assemblages of materials, people, technologies, and concepts, which are constantly being adjusted to meet changing resources and needs, and to define new relationships.