The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism : Normalising Precarity in Austerity London

Temporary Urbanism Has Become An Established Marker Of City Making After The 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The Book Offers A Critical Exploration Of Its Emergence And Establishment As A Seductive Discourse And As An Entangled Field Of Urban Practice Encompassing Architecture, Visual And Performative Arts, Urban Regeneration And Planning. Drawing On Seven Years Of Semi-ethnographic Research In London, It Explores The Politics Of Temporariness At Time Of Austerity From A Situated Analysis Of Neighbourhood Transformation And Wider Cultural And Economic Shifts. Through A Sympathetic, Longitudinal Engagement With Projects And Practitioners, The Book Tests The Power Of Aesthetic And Cultural Interventions And Highlights Tensions Between The Promise Of Practices Of Dissenting Vacant Space Re-appropriation, And Their Practical Foreclosure. Against The Normalisation Of Ephemerality, It Develops A Critique Of Temporary Urbanism As A Glamorisation Of The Anticipatory Politics Of Precarity, Transforming Subjectivities And Imaginaries Of Urban Action.