Christine Benna Skytt-Larsen
Anne Gravsholt Busck1
Bettina Lamm- 1Section of Geography, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 2Section of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
The aim of this article is to create fertile ground for critical discussion of the discursive field of temporary urban projects (TUPs), their multiple positionings and governance potential in urban and metropolitan development. TUPs constitute short-lived or temporally restricted spatial interventions and social activities in otherwise vacant urban settings. Often made from cheap materials and simple construction methods, TUPs activate urban spaces in transition. Through spatial appropriations, TUPs can explore new uses and potentials in these transforming urban areas. Despite aesthetic and spatial similarities, the discursive field of TUPs is diverse and covers a plethora of uses and understandings of space, actors, activities, intentions and strategies. A critical discussion that recognizes the multiple positionings of the discursive field of TUPs can deepen and nuance our understanding of the governance potential of TUPs contributing to metropolitan urban development. Because of the diversity in actors, strategies and impacts of TUPs and thus, variations in rationales and positions, we suggest that the phenomenon of TUPs to be perceived as a new urban genre that can be approached from several interrelated perspectives reflecting a diverse discursive field with multiple positionings: (1) a spatial-architectural perspective; (2) an urban-economic perspective; (3) a socio-cultural perspective; (4) a local-social perspective; and (5) a political-planning perspective. This multifaceted and critical approach mirrors the different discursive positionings, initiating rationales, and accompanying practices of TUPs and helps us comprehend and critically discuss the governance perspectives that TUPs bring into the design and planning of urban and metropolitan regions.
Introduction
Urban gardens, pop-up street food markets, collaborative art hubs, hand-made playgrounds and community spaces — the temporary urban project (TUP) is a rapidly growing urban phenomenon of activities emerging in the urban sphere. Since the 19750s, urban transformation processes in the global North have freed up former industrial spaces and harbor sites for new rounds of urbanization to take place (Harvey, 1989, 2006; Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Consequently, urban sites often within distinct urban locations have been left with undefined status for shorter or longer periods. It is in such sites and spaces that TUPs often take place. The combination of un-programmed sites, expansive spaces, temporary zoning gaps, and relatively low rents has provided opportunities for urban actors to experiment with new urban formats in these places until they are needed as locations for new phases of urbanization.
A TUP materializes as a spatial intervention inserted into the urban context, and often with a social and cultural content developed through on-site bottom-up processes and built from light materials and “ready-mades” (Bishop and Williams, 2012; Madanipour, 2018). See Figure 1 below for an example of how a TUP was used to activate a vacant urban site in Copenhagen, Denmark. TUPs can last for a day, a week, a month, a year or more, but have a relatively short-lived and intermediate existence. TUPs can appear handmade, loose and even unfinished, offering a stark contrast to the more static and solid city elements of buildings, spaces, infrastructural facilities and paving. In the literature, TUPs are also referred to as interim urban spaces, indeterminate spaces, temporary urban activities, Zwischennutzung, as well as tactical urbanism, urban experiments, prototypes or urban labs that also reflect their role as tools for urban development.
Figure 1. “Valby Pavillon - TH Bar”, a temporary urban project in Copenhagen, Denmark. A vacant urban site (a former auto repair shop) was activated for communal uses through a temporary pavilion, a pop-up container bar, a herb garden and an exchange station. The place existed as a popular destination in the neighborhood until housing construction activities took over the site. TH Bar and its activities are in the process of relocating to a new site in the neighborhood. Credit: Pavilion and project initiation: Bettina Lamm, Anne Wagner and Kristian Skaarup in collaboration with Valby Lokaludvalg (Valby local government committee). TH Bar developed by Nima Alijani. Photo: Bettina Lamm.
TUPs often exist outside the existing planning paradigm and are treated as exceptions to the normal process of urban regulations and permissions (Wagner, 2016). By offering alternative readings of urban resources and potentials, such temporary projects often challenge spatial dominations, zoning regulations and planning policies.
The academic and political interest in and use of TUPs has grown continuously since the 1970s, when squatter movements and other self-organized urban activists with dreams of an alternative organization of the urban began to take advantage of vacant urban space illegally or tacitly accepted by the authorities (Mayer, 2013; Groth and Corijn, 2015; Vasudevan, 2015; Bragaglia and Rossignolo, 2021). In the last two decades, however, TUPs have been increasingly co-opted into metropolitan development strategies as new forms of spatial production and prototyping approaches, thus becoming part of public planning and policies (Ferreri, 2015, 2021; Groth and Corijn, 2015; Wagner, 2016; Colomb, 2017; Madanipour, 2017; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020a).
The current attraction of TUPs for city authorities and metropolitan governments is the ability to respond to several contemporary critical metropolitan issues (Ferreri, 2015). First, TUPs offer low-cost opportunities for revitalizing vacant urban spaces and sites that are awaiting transformation (Németh and Langhorst, 2014). Second, TUPs fit well into dominant paradigms of “the neo-liberal or entrepreneurial city” (Harvey, 1989) or “the creative city” (Florida, 2002), as they provide a way of increasing the attractiveness and competitiveness of cities by introducing new spaces of culture and publicness (Lamm and Wagner, 2015; Madanipour, 2018; Parker et al., 2019). Finally, the relatively low set-up costs, in combination with a temporary or open timeframe, often appeal to urban entrepreneurs (Munzner and Shaw, 2015; Scott and Szili, 2018; Jokela, 2020; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020a,b) and frequently play a role as part of urban experiments and living labs (Karvonen and Van Heur, 2014). Thus, TUPs provide a way for cities to brand themselves as liveable, creative and start-up-friendly. In this regard, and as many scholars acknowledge, temporary urbanism has become a major contemporary urban-planning trend in the global North promoting governmental aims in respect of both urban life and economic growth.
Although broad and diverse, the TUP can be understood as a typology of aesthetic expressions, content, context, production method and legislative status. It can be regarded as a new and contemporary genre in city-making cultures in both how it spatializes and materializes, what it offers and how it is produced. Paradoxically, the elusiveness of the concept is to a high degree exactly what gives it its driving power and space for action. Similar to some of its neighboring terms, such as “urban laboratories” and “living labs” (Karvonen and Van Heur, 2014; Marvin et al., 2018), TUPs work as operative loopholes and discursive frameworks (Wagner, 2016). The point is therefore not to define the temporal limitation of a given project or a fixed set of actors involved, but to focus on how and why TUPs are engaged with and across different traditions.
Literature Review: Identifying The Discursive Field
Recently, a vast literature on TUPs has emerged revealing the multiple positionings and accompanying rationales, approaches, actors and understandings. Much of this literature consists of reports originating in planning and consultancy agencies, and focus on documenting and evaluating best practice (see, for instance, Realdania, 2013; Elisei, 2015; Jégou and Bonneau, 2016; KL, 2017; GivRum, 2018). This literature contains guidelines for the execution of TUPs and highlights their potential for urban transformation, but does not provide much theoretical or critical analytical grounding. Another body of literature stems from various academic fields and addresses TUPs through case studies and thematic discussions, tentatively referring to the potential spatial and communal impacts of such activities often related to specific spheres of the public realm (Bishop and Williams, 2012; Oswalt et al., 2013; Lamm and Wagner, 2015; Madanipour, 2018; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020a). Discussion has centered on the role of TUPs in the cultivation of new public space, activating unused sites and revitalizing the city's historical memory through a new form of urban aesthetics (Novy and Colomb, 2013; Lamm and Wagner, 2015; Lydon and Garcia, 2015; Wagner, 2016; Parker et al., 2019; Bragaglia and Rossignolo, 2021). In addition, the role of TUPs in the economic development of cities and metropolitan areas has been discussed, focusing for instance on their uniqueness and attraction as incubator spaces for creative startups and art based entrepreneurs (Munzner and Shaw, 2015; Scott and Szili, 2018; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020b). Also, the connection between TUPs and gentrification has been addressed, where TUPs are seen as increasing urban areas' cultural value and attractiveness later to be harvested by property-owners and urban developers (Ferreri, 2015; Munzner and Shaw, 2015; Madanipour, 2018). In addition, there have been studies discussing TUPs as generators of enhanced citizen participation and more socially just cities emerging through community involvement and locally anchored activities (Iveson, 2013; Novy and Colomb, 2013; Lehtovuori and Ruoppila, 2017; Thorpe et al., 2017; Parker et al., 2019). In such cases, TUPs may act as a spatialization and visualization of temporary alternatives to the institutionalized domain and the dominant principles of urban development (Groth and Corijn, 2015).
It is clear that the literature on TUPs disclose strong variations in the positionings of the discursive field of temporary urban projects, revealing that TUPs, despite aesthetic and spatial similarities in practice, are initiated by a plethora of different actors and hold very different rationales and intentions. While there has been wider focus on how cities and planners can use TUPs strategically (Colomb, 2012, 2017; Ferreri, 2021), and what this means for urban and metropolitan development, there is still limited knowledge on the discursive field of the concept and how a critical discussion of this may contribute to urban governance.
The literature is greatly influenced and has been created by multiple private and public bodies and various academic fields. Therefore, it represents different positionings and “silos of rationale” of what TUPs are, where they emerge from, and their potential for the actors involved as well as for urban development (Groth and Corijn, 2015; Wagner, 2016; Henneberry, 2017; Madanipour, 2018). The main positions in the discursive field can be identified as understanding and approaching TUPs through architecture and physical urban space or through specific spheres of the public realm. Moreover, in contemporary urban theory it has been argued that The form in which cities take shape are deeply determined by economic arrangements, social relations and divisions, legal constructions and political systems” (Tonkiss, 2013:2). Thus, based on a relational, socio-material perspective of the urban, and inspired by a combination of urban theory and the literature on TUP, we have identified five major positionings in the discursive field of TUPs. This implies: (1) a spatial-architectural perspective involving a close reading of the practices and impacts on urban transformations that manifest themselves in and through TUPs; (2) an urban-economic perspective involving research on the motivations, networks and learnings of investors, property-owners and developers (3) a socio-cultural perspective scrutinizing the knowledge, networks and value that more or less organized groups of actors who are directly involved bring to and harvest from TUPs; (4) a local-social perspective elucidating the impact on and the integration of local communities and everyday citizens in TUPs; and (5) a political-planning perspective exploring the perceptions and practices of planners and politicians on metropolitan transformations that make use of the TUP approach.
These multiple perspectives reflect what we identify as the five major discursive positionings of the field as well as the main drivers in the contemporary urban practices of TUPs, and are based on a prevalent understanding of the urban field as a relational interplay of formal as well as informal socio-material dynamics and elements (Tonkiss, 2013). However, when theorizing as well as when rationalizing practices, the multiplicity of rationalities from other positions are seldom acknowledged. Inevitably, our present understanding of the contemporary urban phenomenon of the TUP is fragmented and inadequately conceptualized, as the separation of these positionings constitutes a simplified reduction of the urban sphere and thus the discursive field of TUPs. Such a reductionist approach hinders an understanding of urban space not as a given entity or sphere, but as something which must be continually produced and constructed to exist.
Therefore, when reviewing and assessing TUPs it is important to understand the nuances of the multiple positions, and what they reflect and represent. Also, as urban space is not a domain of “single miracle workers” (Lefebvre, 1996), we find it even more important to shed light on the interrelations between these different perspectives. Consequently, to capture the various drivers, aims, strategies and integrated impacts of TUPs, we propose that critical discussions of the phenomenon of TUP acknowledge the multiple positionings and “siloes of rationales” that exist in the discursive field of temporary urbanism. This prompts us to deliberate on the nuances in the variations in types and aims, where and what they come from, how they operate and how these tactics can be adopted into local and regional governance and metropolitan planning.
Explicating The Multiple Positions in The Discursive Field of Temporary Urban Projects
To engage in a critical discussion of the governance potentials of TUPs, it is necessary to understand the main positionings and rationales of the field. Thus, below we describe each position and affiliated research themes. This is followed by a discussion of how a critical approach combining these positions and the interrelations between them will enrich the understanding of the governance potentials of TUPs on urban and metropolitan development.
The Spatial-Architectural Rationale: Positioning the Physical Space of TUPs
The main rationales characterizing this positioning stem from landscape transformation theory, in which TUPs are highlighted as dynamic design modes and as a new urban transformation strategy (Braae, 2015; Diedrich, 2013) where a critical dissemination of spatial progression and development over time still needs investigation (Lamm and Wagner, 2015). The main argument is that periods of urban transformation with deindustrialization processes and economic recessions have left urban spaces with the vacant sites in which TUPs initially emerged. The raw and unpolished environments of abandoned industrial spaces, former military sites or brownfield areas have offered distinct and aesthetically different terrains that have provided room for and inspired a myriad of new uses and approaches to publicly and culturally oriented architectural designs and functions. As such, these spaces enable the cultivation of the historical memory of the city while at the same time providing space for cultural and art based activities strongly inspired by the unique character and scale of these spaces (Bishop and Williams, 2012; Oswalt et al., 2013; Jégou and Bonneau, 2016; Madanipour, 2018; Bragaglia and Rossignolo, 2021).
Short-term leases and instant takeovers require quick, cheap and modular methods of building and design, often on a potentially polluted site. Therefore, universal industrial artifacts that are easily recycled, adapted and transported, such as containers, pallets, instant lawn mats and cable drums, have been assembled in the form of human-scaled spaces providing new urban destinations. This has therefore become a particular urban architectural genre of temporary aesthetics (Bishop and Williams, 2012; Oswalt et al., 2013; Lamm and Wagner, 2015; Wagner, 2016).
Temporary aesthetics have inspired urban and metropolitan planning, influencing how urban public spaces can be prototyped, created and altered. The tactics of TUPs have also proved useful when testing new urban functionalities by allowing different kinds of governance models for citizen inclusion in defining, making and using urban space. Thus, a close reading of the spatial and the physical changes that manifest themselves in and through TUPs will elucidate how TUPs define and influence urban spatial contexts, how specific types of aesthetics, programs, spatial characters and production methods are promoted, and how this potentially contributes to long-term transformations of the metropolitan environment.
The Urban-Economic Rationale: Positioning Developers, Property-Owners and Other Economic TUP-Actors
The main rationale that characterizes the urban-economic positioning is based on the capitalist argument that urban change is generated by flows of capital and people. In this regard, TUPs are celebrated for contributing to increasing the use and exchange values of urban places (Ferreri, 2015). Furthermore, TUPs often intensify and diversify urban use of otherwise vacant or abandoned spaces, thereby sparking new interest and branding, and ultimately demonstrating commercial value and investment potential (Colomb, 2012; Lehtovuori and Ruoppila, 2017; Scott and Szili, 2018). This is particularly useful for urban developers or property-owners seeking an intermediate situation before renovation or buy-out. Given even a small investment, they can accommodate a temporary use for the site for a limited period and hence will benefit from the maintenance of their location just as their tenants will benefit from a low rent. Moreover, this can provide other urban actors with a space in which to test business ideas and programs, as in a period of incubation (Jégou and Bonneau, 2016; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020b).
In discussing the governance potentials of TUPs, less emphasis has been placed on discussing developments that involve an intensity of fixed, but temporary capital investments designed to accommodate urban sites' “highest and best use” (Clark et al., 2015). The role of TUPs as active forces in increasing potential land rents, potentially leading to geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), has also been less addressed. Although TUPs have been widely celebrated for the economic value they bring to urban space and urban actors, knowledge of the motivations, networks and learnings of actors with an economic interest in TUPs is scarce (Bragaglia and Caruso, 2020; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020b).
Approaching the TUP from the roles of investors, property-owners and developers will contribute to a critical discussion of the use of TUPs in urban transformations and shed light on how this is tightly tied up with neoliberal interests, but also more or less altruistic motivations (Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020b). Secondly, this will reveal the experiences and networks that economic actors bring to and harvest from urban space through TUPs. Finally, yet importantly, it explores the relationship between TUPs and potential processes of urban gentrification (Munzner and Shaw, 2015; Scott and Szili, 2018). Accordingly, it will also elucidate discussions of how TUPs may contribute to urban justice (Iveson, 2013; Novy and Colomb, 2013; Lehtovuori and Ruoppila, 2017; Thorpe et al., 2017; Parker et al., 2019) or urban revanchism (Smith, 1996).
The Socio-Cultural Rationale: Positioning Civil Society and Directly Involved TUP-Actors
This positioning of the discursive field is characterized by socio-cultural arguments of approaching TUPs through the civil society and actors directly involved in the practice and development of TUPs. Here, it is argued that traditionally, self-organized urban activists with dreams and ambitions of alternative urban development initiated the TUP (Hargreaves et al., 2013; Mayer, 2013; Groth and Corijn, 2015; Vasudevan, 2015; Bragaglia and Rossignolo, 2021). However, in the last two decades, the TUP has increasingly entered into formal public planning and urban policies (Ferreri, 2015; Wagner, 2016; Madanipour, 2017; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020a).
As TUPs have become important strategic planning tools, actors who were earlier part of more informal urban activities are being invited to participate in formal urban development either run by or in collaboration with public authorities, property-owners or urban developers (Mayer, 2013; Skytt-Larsen and Busck, 2020a). The increase in government-initiated TUPs has thus been followed by a growth in both the scope and variety of projects and activities, and of the actors involved. Some of these actors are more closely related to the aims of a project than to space and will thus “travel” from TUP to TUP with their knowledge, relationships and ideas. Such actors may be conceptualized as flexible, creative freelancers of urban space. However, they are often argued to be precarious actors of the experience economy (Kong, 2013) with bulimic careers (Pratt, 2000).
Little knowledge is available about the actors who are directly involved, whether volunteers, activists, social entrepreneurs or urban freelancers, nor their activities, organization and networks, nor the role they play in urban development, planning practices or social change. Engaging in the socio-cultural position highlighting the perspective of civil society and of the actors directly involved will therefore elucidate the value of TUPs for the actors' engagement and lives, as well as the knowledge and networks they bring to, and harvest from, their engagement with the TUP. This will add new critical reflections on the value that these actors bring to urban space and planning practices and vice versa, showing how this influences contemporary and future urban and metropolitan development processes.
The Local-Social Rationale: Positioning Local Communities and The Everyday Life Surrounding TUPs
Urban space influences and is influenced by actors living, using, crossing and planning specific urban places (Lefebvre, 1984; Massey, 1994; Harvey, 2012), meaning that TUPs influence and are influenced by the local social context of the urban places in which they exist.
As TUPs involve many different actors with potentially divergent intentions and aims, varying from the strategic urban and economic to more altruistic or local participatory motivations, they often suggest new ways of using urban space, changing urban places and place identities. Depending on the initial visions of a given TUP, the inclusion of local citizens and the surrounding everyday life varies, meaning that in cases where the actors who are involved in changing local urban space do not share the local sense of place, TUPs may leave urban places alienated and unapproachable to their everyday users.
In the literature on TUPs, the involvement and integration of local communities and everyday citizens in temporary urbanism has received little attention. Scrutinizing TUPs from the local-social position will thus shed light on the ways in which they contribute to the transformation of urban places, place identities and senses of place. In addition, elucidating how TUPs influence and are influenced by local social networks and everyday experiences can be used to establish in-depth knowledge of the locally embedded social impacts that a TUP may create in the long run. In this way, approaching the TUP from this perspective will contribute to a critical discussion of how TUPs influence urban liveability and inclusiveness, as well as to wider discussions of how urban governance influences everyday urban life.
The Political-Planning Rationale: Positioning Governance Systems, The Role of TUP Planners and Other Authorities
The initiative for starting a TUP may come from various actors with various objectives, but in any case, the temporary and experimental nature of TUPs presents both possibilities and challenges to the planning system. An overarching argument in this positioning of the discursive field is that as TUPs are often included in strategic planning, understanding and discussing the role of planning and planners at different levels becomes even more important. Depending on the urban context, strategic objectives from a political-planning perspective can range from “good use of vacant spaces, in order not to let them decay physically and socially” via “relevant use until a new planned activity starts” to “trying out possible futures”.
In the literature on TUPs, the role of planning, planners and politicians, and interactions with developers and citizens, has been illustrated in different contexts, including how public bodies may initiate TUPs and actively involve citizens (Madureira, 2013; Oswalt et al., 2013; GivRum, 2018). However, less attention has been given to critically discuss the interactions and to conceptualize and analyze how TUPs challenge and influence governance systems and planning practices (Iveson, 2013; Parker et al., 2019).
Approaching the TUP from the political-planning perspective allows exploration of how TUPs influence and are influenced by the way the planners and politicians conceptualize and plan for sustainable urbanism. Secondly, it reveals and challenges the perception and practice of planners and politicians regarding metropolitan transformations with the use of a TUP. Lastly, it fosters a critical discussion of how integrating TUPs into planning influences the relations between the actors involved in governance (Svara, 2006; KL, 2017), as well as across sectorial jurisdictions and levels of governance within public governance systems.
Summing UP: Prspectives For A Critical Discussion of The Governance Potentials of Temporary Urban Projects
As mentioned above, hitherto the literature on temporary urbanism has revealed several different but overlapping rationales of the discursive field of TUPs. We acknowledge the importance of conceptualizing, identifying and explicating the themes within each of these discursive positionings, as they represent different rationales, logics and theoretical framings often related to specific spheres of the public realm. However, in order to engage in a critical reflection of the TUP as an important urban phenomenon, we consider it even more important to bring together the isolated “silos of rationale” (Sum and Jessop, 2013; Wagner, 2016; Henneberry, 2017) and scrutinize the interrelations between two or more positionings as these together forms both the discursive and practical field of TUPs. An example of such interrelations is that a property-owner may actively involve activists in developing a TUP, revealing that urban-economic and socio-cultural rationalities often intersect in practice, leading to a critical assessment of how these activists may be seen as precarious freelancers with limited rights to urban space when the TUP ends. While another examination could focus on the relation between the specific spatial characteristics of TUPs, their socio-cultural contexts and how the presence of a TUP influences local citizens and their sense of place. Thus, unfolding the discursive field of TUPs necessitates a fuller recognition of the main positionings, which may require interdisciplinarity and collaboration between more researchers or even transdisciplinarity, by actively involve actors outside academia (Henneberry, 2017). Empirically, the use of common cases may enhance the understanding of how different rationales interact and influence each other. In practice, TUPs vary in time and space, thus an assessment of the phenomenon should give emphasis to different temporal project phases and how these influence and are influenced by the different rationales and their interrelations.
Bringing awareness to how TUPs influence and are influenced by rationales within the five main positions will deepen our understanding of the both spatial, economic, and social values and possibilities that temporary urbanism can bring into the planning of urban and metropolitan regions in a governance perspective. This comprehension may give rise to reflections among urban planners and politicians of how regulating and facilitating for TUPs can benefit current urban and metropolitan development, and thereby challenge current governance systems and the strategic inclusion of TUP in urban and metropolitan planning and development.
A critical discussion implies not just critique in the sense of negative criticism, but also a focus on the formal and informal power structures and the implications for the transformative potentials of TUPs. This is important, as the TUP evolves in the context of established power structures represented by, for instance, metropolitan strategies, urban plans, zoning and legislation, and the interests of property owners. Our quest for a critical discussion is thus to be understood as a questioning of power relations and dynamics in the tradition of critical theory, but also as an urge to engage in a multi-perspective and nuanced discussion of TUPS that does not'stay safe' within one specific rationale but encourages cross-sectoral framings. Furthermore, as TUPs vary not only in spatial context but also in time, we suggest giving emphasis to the temporal project phases of TUPs. Thus, when approaching and discussing TUPs it is important to consider whether the project is in an initiative phase, the active main phase, the termination phase, or the post TUP phase, and discuss how temporality influences and is influenced by multiple rationalities and their interrelations.
The political and academic shift from seeing TUPs as a marginal practice to including it into mainstream urban policy (Mayer, 2013; Madanipour, 2018; Bragaglia and Caruso, 2020) is an ambiguous and controversial topic. Adding to the complexity is the fact that small-scale temporary experiments are increasingly used also in development processes in peri-urban and rural areas. Just as in the case of TUPs, these initiatives operate with various constellations of actors and objectives. We therefore suggest that temporary urban projects are a phenomenon that is here to stay, a phenomenon, which will have major impacts not only at the local level of urban neighborhoods, but also on the larger scale of strategic city and metropolitan governance. This can challenge the governance system and present opportunities for experiments that can lead to changes in the way we see and understand urban and metropolitan development and the role of public actors. A combined discursive lens across research and practice traditions, and critical discussions acknowledging the multiple positionings of the field, is needed to achieve such an understanding.
Data Availability Statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.
Author Contributions
CS-L, AB, AW, and BL contributed to conception and design of the study. CS-L wrote the first draft of the manuscript. AB, AW, and BL contributed with subsections and/or comments to the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher's Note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Acknowledgments
Some of the preliminary ideas for this article are based on discussions with Trine Agervig Carstensen, Lise Herslund Byskov, and Ditte Rasmussen Brøgger. We express their gratitude for these inspiring talks.
References
Braae, E.. (2015). Beauty Redeemed - Recycling Post-industrial Landscapes. Risskov/Basel: Ikaros Press and Birkhäuser.
Bragaglia, F., and Caruso, N. (2020). Temporary Uses: A New Form of Inclusive Urban Regeneration or a Tool For Neoliberal Policy? Urban Research and Practice. doi: 10.1080/17535069.2020.1775284
Bragaglia, F., and Rossignolo, C. (2021). Temporary Urbanism as a New Policy Strategy: A Contemporary Panacea Or A Trojan Horse? International Planning Studies. doi: 10.1080/13563475.2021.1882963
Brenner, N., and Schmid, C. (2015). Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City. 19, 151–182. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712
Brenner, N., and Theodore, N. (2002). Cities and the geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Antipode. 34, 349–379. doi: 10.1111/1467-8330.00246
Clark, E., Larsen, H. G., and Hansen, A. L. (2015). Financialisation of built environments: a literature review. In: FESSUD Working Papers Series. no. 114.
Colomb, C.. (2012). Pushing the urban frontier: temporary uses of space, city marketing, and the creative city discourse in the 2000s Berlin. J Urban Affair. 34, 131–152. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.2012.00607.x
Colomb, C.. (2017). The Trajectory of Berlin's ‘Interim Spaces': Tensions and Conflicts in the Mobilisation of ‘Temporary Uses' of Urban Space in Local Economic Development. In: Transience and Permanence in Urban Development edited by Henneberry, J. p. 131–49. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781119055662.ch9
Diedrich, L.. (2013). Translating Harbourscapes: Site-specific Design Approaches in Contemporary European Harbour Transformation (Ph.D. thesis). Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg.
Elisei, P.. (2015). TUTUR Final Report. URBACT Publishing. Available online at: http://tutur.eu/wpcontent/uploads/2015/05/FINAL_REPORT_TUTUR_final.pdf.
Ferreri, M.. (2021). The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London,.Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv1hp5hhs
Groth, J., and Corijn, E. (2015). Reclaiming urbanity: indeterminate spaces, informal actors and urban agenda setting. Urban Stud. 42, 503–526. doi: 10.1080/00420980500035436
Hargreaves, T., Hielscher, S., Seyfang, G., and Smith, A. (2013). Grassroots innovations in community energy: the role of intermediaries in niche development. Global Environ. Change. 23, 868–880. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.02.008
Harvey, D.. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler B. 71, 3–17. doi: 10.1080/04353684.1989.11879583
Harvey, D.. (2012). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso.
Henneberry, J.. (2017). Transience and Permanence in Urban Development. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781119055662
Iveson, K.. (2013). Cities within the city: do-it-yourself urbanism and the right to the city. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res. 37, 941–956. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12053
Jégou, F., and Bonneau, M. (2016). REFILL Report. URBACT Publishing. Available online at: http://resilia-solutions.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/REFILL_160513_SoA_Final_To-be-published.pdf
Jokela, S.. (2020). Transformative city branding and the evolution of the entrepreneurial city: The case of ‘Brand New Helsinki'. Urban Stud. 57, 2031–2046. doi: 10.1177/0042098019867073
Karvonen, A., and Van Heur, B. (2014). Urban laboratories: experiments in reworking cities. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res. 38, 379–392. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12075
Kommunernes Landsforening (KL) (2017). Kvalitet og effektivitet i lokalplanlægningen. København: Rosendahls a/s
Kong, L.. (2013). From precarious labor to precarious economy? Planning for precarity in Singapore's creative economy. City, Cult. Soc. 2, 55–64. doi: 10.1016/j.ccs.2011.05.002
Lamm, B., and Wagner, A. M. (2015). Temporary public space strategies in large-scale urban transformation projects. In: Paper presented at ECLAS Conference 2015, Tartu, Estonia.
Lefebvre, H.. (1984). Everyday Life in The Modern World. New Brunswick and London: Transactions Books.
Lehtovuori, P., and Ruoppila, S. (2017). Temporary uses producing difference in contemporary urbanism. In: Transience and Permanence in Urban Development edited by Henneberry, J. p. 47–63. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781119055662.ch4
Lydon, M., and Garcia, A. (2015). Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change. Washington DC: Island Press. doi: 10.5822/978-1-61091-567-0
Madanipour, A.. (2017). Cities in Time. Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City. London: Bloomsbury Academic. doi: 10.5040/9781350014275
Madanipour, A.. (2018). Temporary use of space: urban processes between flexibility, opportunity and precarity, Urban Stud. 55, 1093–1110. doi: 10.1177/0042098017705546
Madureira, A. M.. (2013). Physical planning in entrepreneurial urban governance - experiences from the bo01 and brunnshög projects, Sweden. Eur. Plan. Stud. 22, 2369–2388. doi: 10.1080/09654313.2013.843650
Marvin, S., Bulkeley, H., Mai, L., McCormick, K., and Palgan, Y. V. (2018). Urban Living Labs: Experimenting with City Futures. New York: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315230641
Massey, D.. (1994). A global sense of place. In: Space, Place and Gender, edited by D. Massey. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 146–156.
Mayer, M.. (2013). First world urban activism: beyond austerity urbanism and creative city politics. City. 17, 5–19. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2013.757417
Munzner, K., and Shaw, K. (2015). Renew who? Benefits and beneficiaries of Renew Newcastle. Urban Policy Res. 33, 17–36. doi: 10.1080/08111146.2014.967391
Németh, J., and Langhorst, J. (2014). Rethinking urban transformation: temporary uses for vacant land. Cities. 40, 143–150. doi: 10.1016/j.cities.2013.04.007
Novy, J., and Colomb, C. (2013). Struggling for the right to the (creative) city in Berlin and Hamburg: New urban social movements, new ‘spaces of hope'? Int. J. Urban Reg Res. 37, 1816–1838. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01115.x
Oswalt, P., Overmeyer, K., and Misselwitz, P. (2013). Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use. Berlin: Dom Publishers.
Parker, P., Vogel, N., and Diedrich, L. (2019). Investigating the democratic potential of temporary uses in urban redevelopment projects. In: Enabling Urban Alternatives, edited by J. Fisker, L. Chiappini, L. Pugalis, and A. Bruzzese, p. 85–107. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan doi: 10.1007/978-981-13-1531-2_5
Pratt, A. C.. (2000). New media, the new economy and new spaces. Geoforum. 31, 425–436. doi: 10.1016/S0016-7185(00)00011-7
Scott, M., and Szili, G. (2018). Pop-up Polanyi: cultural entrepreneurs and the ‘vacancy fix'. City, Culture and Society 14, 22–27. doi: 10.1016/j.ccs.2017.12.005
Skytt-Larsen, C. B., and Busck, A. G. (2020a). Midlertidige byrumsanvendelser - et strategisk værktøj i byudviklingen. In: Gentænk Byen, edited by G. Jørgensen, L. Winther, E.H. Jensen, M. Nørgaard, K.S. Møller, and S. Folvig, p. 99–105. Dansk Byplanlaboratorium, Copenhagen.
Skytt-Larsen, C. B., and Busck, A. G. (2020b). Midlertidige byrumsanvendelser som iværksætter-rugekasser: En fortælling om Copenhagen Street Food. University of Copenhagen: Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, Frederiksberg. ISBN: 978-87-7903-840-0.
Smith, N.. (1996). The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.
Sum, N.-L., and Jessop, B. (2013). Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. doi: 10.4337/9780857930712
Svara, J. H.. (2006). Introduction: Politicians and administrators in the political process -A review of themes and issues in the literature. Int. J. Public Admin. 29, 953–976. doi: 10.1080/01900690600854555
Thorpe, A., Moore, T., and Stickells, L. (2017). Pop-up justice? Reflecting on relationships in the temporary city. In Transience and Permanence in Urban Development, edited by Henneberry, J. p. 151–169. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781119055662.ch10
Vasudevan, A.. (2015). Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781118750520
Keywords: temporary urban projects, governance, urban space, urban actors, critical assessment
Citation: Skytt-Larsen CB, Busck AG, Lamm B and Wagner AM (2022) Temporary Urban Projects: Proposing a Multi-Positional Framework for Critical Discussion. Front. Sustain. Cities 4:722665. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2022.722665
Received: 09 June 2021; Accepted: 25 February 2022;
Published: 24 March 2022.
Edited by:
Hans Andersen, Aalborg University Copenhagen, DenmarkReviewed by:
Ralph Horne, RMIT University, AustraliaChristian Scholl, Maastricht University, Netherlands
Copyright © 2022 Skytt-Larsen, Busck, Lamm and Wagner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Christine Benna Skytt-Larsen, cbs@ign.ku.dk