The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London (Cities and Cultures)

by Mara Ferreri

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Book cover for The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism

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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.
  • ISBN13 9789462984912
  • Publish Date 11 March 2021
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country NL
  • Imprint Amsterdam University Press
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 194
  • Language English