| dc.description.abstract | Temporary urban projects are often portrayed as offering innovative and experimental
solutions to the challenges of countering the negative perceptions associated with vacancy,
and of providing rent-free open spaces for non-commercial activities in inner city areas. The
political implications of temporary use, however, are controversial, being both celebrated as
a form of participatory and emancipatory spatial re-appropriation and critiqued as a new
frontier of experiential place marketing and a symptom of urban gentrification. This thesis
aims to provide a situated investigation of the tension between the potential of reappropriation
and its wider material conditions, to discuss the precarious politics of
temporary use as a form of urban action at a time of austerity.
My reflections are grounded in an ethnographic approach to practices of temporary use in
contemporary London and in an in-depth study of a selection of cultural and activist projects
that reclaim vacant shop fronts for community uses. In this thesis I address three main
issues. The first concerns the development of the discourse of temporary reuse, and
particularly of pop-up shops, between 2009 and 2011. By analysing media coverage, public
events and forms of self-representation of London-based practices and practitioners, I attend
to official and unofficial narratives mobilised and performed by a range of urban actors. The
second issue concerns the material conditions of temporary vacant shop front reuse. In order
to ‘re-materialise’ temporary reuse I engage with the often overlooked questions of access,
diverse economies, and labour. Lastly, my investigation is concerned with the potential of
these practices to engender radically different socio-spatial relations. Drawing on recent
debates around the ‘affective turn’ in social sciences, I analyse the emotionally-charged
performative openness of community-oriented shop fronts as capable of creating places
where meanings and subject-positions are challenged and negotiated, offering insights into
their potential for transformative urban encounters. | en_US |
