Temporary Urbanism

Festive events are increasing in cities because the city authorities exploit them to increase the tourist attractiveness of cities and in order to capture the competitive flow of a urban economy more and more symbolic and based on the presence of consumers. The organization of festive events is a strategy of urban marketing based on a scenogaphy of the city that stress local social life and urbanity by stimulating the festive gathering. They influence the conditions of living together in public places because they transformed them. As a tool of temporary urbanism, festive events shape a particular urbanity that will be analysed as a combination between political production and social appropriation through three events in Paris, Brussels and Montreal. The festive sociality is a co-production between a controlled and standardized model of society and a social construction of a temporary way to be together in the city.

Les événements festifs se multiplient dans les villes. Pris en main par les autorités urbaines, ils sont instrumentalisés pour augmenter l’attractivité touristique des villes. Plus largement, ils participent d’un marketing urbain pour capter les flux concurrentiels dans le cadre d’une transformation des économies urbaines, davantage immatérielles et présentielles. Cette stratégie événementielle est basée sur une mise en scène de la ville qui travaille et médiatise l’urbanité locale par le rassemblement. Compris comme des dispositifs d’aménagement temporaire, ils influencent les modalités du vivre-ensemble dans les lieux publics. Ils participent de l’émergence d’une urbanité événementielle qu’il s’agira d’explorer à travers l’analyse des modalités de production politique et d’appropriation sociale de trois événements à Paris, Bruxelles et Montréal. L’urbanité événementielle est une coproduction dynamique entre un modèle de rassemblement maîtrisé et normalisé et la construction sociale d’un vivre-ensemble temporaire.

隨著對糧食安全以及環境永續議題的重視，都市農耕近年來已成為一股世界性的潮流。都市農園、屋頂菜園與社區園圃，如雨後春筍般，在世界各地城市的各種角落出現。過去一直被視為是臨時甚至是非法行為的菜園，一時之間，成為炙熱的城市運動。...都市農耕在西雅圖有一段長久的歷史。在一九三○年代美國經濟大蕭條的時期，面臨失業與糧食不足，當時相關單位把機場空地釋放出來讓民眾耕作。數年後，在二次大戰時期，為確保糧食的供應，也有學校校地提供出來讓民眾耕作的案例。但隨著經濟的復甦與戰爭的結束，這些臨時性的措施也就風消雲散，沒有再持續下去。也因此，跟其他北美洲的城市一樣，都市農耕在西雅圖一直被視為暫時性的土地使用，而非永久性的都市景觀。[more] ...

(Back cover blurb by Isaac Marrero-Guillamón) Notes from the Temporary City takes you on a tour of a neighbourhood on the cusp of change. It provides a complex picture of the dynamics reshaping contemporary London, from the pressure of market forces to new structures of governance and the ingenuity of its residents. Ferreri and Lang's Hackney Wick has the power of synecdoche – it speaks of a wider metropolitan condition where temporary uses are entangled in the desire to both break from capitalist urbanisation and profit from it. Rather than a catalogue of good practices, this book provides something much more compelling and necessary for the analysis of temporary use – a trajectory of disagreements, deviations and paths not taken.

Dans le contexte d’un engouement récent pour la notion d’urbanisme transitoire, cette thèse s’intéresse à l’appropriation des démarches d’occupation temporaire de l’espace par les professionnels de l’urbanisme et de l’immobilier. Hérités de pratiques anciennes, les projets d’occupation temporaire se multiplient à l’échelle du Grand Paris au sein d’emprises et de bâtiments vacants destinés à accueillir prochainement un projet urbain. Objet «chaud» et mouvant, l’urbanisme transitoire est investi d’une pluralité de valeurs et d’enjeux par les acteurs impliqués dans ces démarches: propriétaires, collectivités, aménageurs, promoteurs et nouveaux professionnels de l’occupation temporaire.
Le terrain principal de la thèse porte sur la démarche d’urbanisme transitoire développée dès sa création en 2015 par SNCF Immobilier, structure en charge de la gestion et de la valorisation du vaste patrimoine foncier et immobilier de la SNCF. D’une démarche à l’origine expérimentale, l’urbanisme transitoire est devenu une nouvelle activité d’entreprise, porteuse d’enjeux stratégiques et opérationnels en amont des projets urbains. Au travers d’une immersion ethnographique au sein de SNCF Immobilier et d’une étude empirique de la mise en œuvre de ces projets temporaires, cette thèse vise à investiguer l’utilisation faite par l’entreprise de ces démarches, les difficultés nouvelles qu’elles soulèvent et les valeurs et enjeux que les salariés associent à ces projets. Source de changements au sein de SNCF Immobilier, le développement de l’urbanisme transitoire permet d’illustrer plus largement la transformation en cours des pratiques professionnelles, des modes d’action et des représentations au sein de l’organisation. Les réflexions de l’opérateur sont influencées par son intégration progressive dans une nouvelle communauté de pratique en faveur de l’urbanisme transitoire, concomitante d’un renouvellement de ses méthodes et de ses réflexions quant à la production de la ville sur le temps long.
Cette recherche mobilise l’urbanisme transitoire comme un outil d’analyse permettant de mettre en perspective l’évolution des modalités de fabrique de la ville, la mutation des espaces urbains et la transformation des acteurs de l’urbanisme et de l’immobilier.

Mots clefs : urbanisme transitoire, occupation temporaire, projet urbain, SNCF, ethnographie

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on several cities. Their cultural sectors stood out as one of the most affected by the crisis, with facilities having to shut down or drastically diminish their capacity worldwide. Given the possibility of future pandemic waves, this paper focus on ways to mitigate the negative impacts of new global crises on cultural practices by looking into smaller-scale and DIY spaces.

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.

Transient, ephemeral, temporary, the practice of planning and urban development has been enriched with a new vocabulary for several years now. The purpose of this article is to describe the importance that certain short-term actions concerning the occupation and development of buildings and spaces are taking on in the logic of the city’s making. Studies and press articles on the subject are multiplying, a market is being formed with specialized actors (collectives, companies, associations), procedures are being structured within local authorities and development actors (landlords, promoters, developers): it goes from dedicated job offers for project management assistants in transitional urban planning or temporary development to calls for expressions of interest concerning the occupation of buildings or temporary occupation proposals in urban requalification projects, etc. The purpose of this article is to propose a system of definitions covering the spectrum of these different actions as they question traditional urban planning in its long-term approaches and present themselves as new tools with multiple forms and objectives. But a little step backwards is necessary beforehand.

Ce guide pratique sur l'étude et la mise en oeuvre des projets temporaires, a été conçu pour l'Union Sociale de L'Habitat à l'attention des organismes Hlm. Il renseigne les questions importantes à se poser à toutes les étapes d'un projet temporaire : définition, montage, mise en oeuvre, réalisation, gestion de site, animation, préparation et fin du projet. Les principaux enseignements des projets sont abordés sous différents angles : volet économique et financier, gouvernance, gestion de site et vie locale, participation des usagers... Le premier chapitre brosse le portrait des différents types de projets temporaires et de leur utilité pour un bailleur dans un projet urbain et dans un territoire. Le second chapitre énumère les conditions importantes à prendre en compte pour lancer un projet temporaire et les implications pour un organisme Hlm. Le troisième chapitre aborde la mise en oeuvre opérationnelle de tels projets. Le quatrième chapitre synthétise les grandes étapes d'un projet tempo-raire, d'un point de vue méthodologique. w Le document s'accompagne de 11 fiches de retours d'expérience sur des projets aux thématiques diverses : aménagements temporaires d'espaces extérieurs, jardins et nature en ville, activités économiques dans des locaux vacants, commerces et services de proximité, interventions artistiques et culturelles. Une boîte à outils constituée de modèles de documents opérationnels (appel à manifestation d'intérêt, cahier des charges, conventions, etc.), directement mobilisables pour conduire un projet.

While temporary urbanism has experienced a resurgence of interest in Western Europe and North America, the phenomenon of urban flux has long been an everyday phenomenon and even a norm in many East Asian cities.  In the dense and populous cities of East Asia, temporary uses are often not a strategy for occupying vacant and abandoned in a specific economic context, but rather an everyday survival tactic in the face of scarce real estate.

Notre rapport au temps, reflet des modes de vie, évolue sous le coup de l’individualisation, la globalisation ou la rationalisation du monde et s’inscrit depuis toujours dans les manières de faire la ville. Depuis la fin des années 80 cependant, le temps semble de plus en plus pris en compte dans la réflexion urbaine ; indirectement d’abord par la question festive d’abord, puis par les politiques temporelles et aujourd’hui par l’urbanisme temporaire. Mais les contours d’un urbanisme temporel restent flous car les actions hétérogènes. Nous proposons dans le cadre des travaux de l’association TempoTerritoriale de poser 3 types d’intégration du temps dans l’aménagement et temps : la connaissance des rythmes des territoires, le temps dans l’aménagement des espaces bâtis et publics, le temps des projets urbains. Nous revenons alors sur les enjeux et limites de l’approche temporelle en urbanisme pour passer à l’idée de prise en compte de la polyrythmie urbaine.

Slow Streets is a project forming part of the Sustainable Mobility pillar within the ResidentFirst vision 2024, developed by The Local Councils' Association ResidentFirst Team in collaboration with Dr Antoine Zammit BE&A (Hons)(Melit) MSc (Lond) PhD (Lond), perit, Founding Architect and Urban Designer at Studjurban and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Spatial Planning and Infrastructure, Faculty for the Built Environment, University of Malta.

During these rough economic times, cities and towns across the globe are dotted with vacant lots, unfinished projects developers have pulled out of, projects on hold for years…Even cities with high land value, such as New York, have empty parcels- just waiting, leaving a void in the urban fabric of neighborhoods, an eye sore to those who see it on a daily basis. But what if something could fill that void? Even if it was only temporary until more concrete plans were set in motion? What if you could turn that void into a pop-up park, an impromptu farmers market, an art show, installation, a café, a music venue…? Temporary urbanism is the exciting notion that we don’t have to live with these voids, they can be filled, even if just temporarily. We don’t have to wait for developers to come in with money; we don’t have to depend on bureaucratic processes to shape our cities. It is possible to re-stitch the fabric of our communities and fulfill the immediate needs and desires of our neighborhoods. With temporary urbanism gaining traction in cities around the country, what seemed like a far reach years ago is now a possibility.

Recent discussions in Participatory Design around infrastructuring and particularly 'agonistic space' offer useful concepts relevant to other fields facing similar issues regarding public settings and related conflicts and contestation among stakeholders. In this paper, 'agonistic space' is used as a conceptual lens to discuss overlapping issues across participatory design and 'temporary use' of space, which is an emerging approach in architecture/planning addressing urban change and land use. This paper focuses in particular on the socio-spatial struggles characterizing 'expanded PD' and temporary use. Furthermore, concepts and issues within discourses and practices of temporary use are identified, which can further expand PD discussions of 'agonistic space'. The paper thus identifies connections between the two practices, which can be a basis for future further research. 1

Abstract Over the last decades, interim reuse has emerged as a possible solution for vacant land and abandoned spaces in cities. It is presented as an alternative to conventional regeneration projects, opening up new possibilities for the occupation of formerly derelict spaces. However, in addition to such opportunities, it also poses a number of risks which need to be mitigated, calling for new mechanisms that foster the consultation and participation of communities within the scope of urban planning. The present research seeks to fill this gap by introducing scenario-elicitation, an innovative participation methodology, which relies on new visualisation and communication techniques in planning. Application of the methodology to an abandoned industrial lot in Barreiro – a shrinking city in the suburban belt of Lisbon, Portugal – yielded the following conclusions: (i) scenario-elicitation constitutes a potential tool for the consultation of communities, as a complement to other visualisation and communication techniques in planning; (ii) interim reuse is embraced by communities as a useful device to respond to vacancy and urban abandonment situations; (iii) citizens' adherence to types of interim reuse is geared, primarily, towards collective space options linked to healthy living practices and the combination of different functional and spatial assets.

Le développement de l’urbanisme temporaire l’accompagne de l’arrivée de nouveaux professionnels, spécialisés dans l’aménagement temporaire des espaces publics ou l’occupation des bâtiments vacants (collectifs, entreprises, associations). Ces acteurs, aux compétences et aux profils divers, proposent de nouvelles manières de faire la ville et valorisent de nouvelles approches tactiques, expérimentales ou encore artistiques. Travaillant de manière de plus en plus étroite avec des collectivités, aménageurs ou promoteurs immobiliers, ils participent à faire bouger les cadres de la fabrique de la ville.

A vast continent with rich cultural traditions, Asia is steeped in its extraordinary heritage of places, ranging from the majestic monasteries in the high plateaus of Tibet to the multicultural streetscapes of George Town on the island of Penang. For ages, these memorable and remarkable sites have evolved through exchanges of cultures and the economic and social life of their communities. They embody systems of cultural values and spatial practices that are integral to the local ways of life and the identities of those places. For much of recent history, however, these longstanding practices of place-making in Asia were disrupted by a multitude of changes, conflicts, colonisation, and rapid economic development, and through institutions imposed on the local communities, including none other than the professional planning and design practice. Over time, vernacular practices gave way to imposed economic and political imperatives. Human-scale places were demolished and replaced by large-scale developments. The city at eye level was transformed by policies at the high level. This chapter examines how placemaking as a contemporary practice serves as an alternative to institutionalized planning and design. It also outlines a series of challenges for placemaking to function as an emancipatory spatial practice.

Over the last two decades, temporary uses of space are spreading in Europe as a new policy tool to recover vacant areas. The theoretical debate is divided between the promoters of these new forms of tailor-made urbanism and the detractors, who argue that temporary urbanism is increasingly subject to profit logic as an urban policy strategy. Through two French case studies (The 'Grands Voisins' in Paris and the 'Transfer Project' in Nantes), the article discusses the characteristics of temporary urban planning and its intrinsic tension between a contemporary panacea and a trojan horse. Can the 'temporary city' be a partial response to the issues of social inclusion, housing, and equal accessibility to spaces and amenities, which the contemporary city seems to fail in? Or is temporary urbanism just an alibi for administrations and local leaders to continue perpetrating neoliberal policies? 50 FREE COPIES: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XAVMJY2C4VJSPDGBVCIJ/full?target=10.1080/1 3563475.2021.1882963

This paper positions the now-redundant Australian Renew Newcastle scheme for temporary building occupation as an example of ‘meanwhile use’: the UK term for the sanctioned short-term use of vacant urban properties awaiting redevelopment. Renew Newcastle was a direct response to the very particular urban conditions of its regional host city, yet its approach reflects the increasing normalisation of temporary urban tenure as a technique of urban renewal. From late 2008 until early 2019, it populated the regional city’s vacant shopfronts and offices with arts and cultural activities using 28-day occupation licenses. Renew Newcastle’s successes were widely lauded and contributed to the city’s 2011 recognition as one of the world’s top ten global tourist destinations (Lonely Planet, 2011).

The paper situates Renew Newcastle’s approach within the historical continuum of spatial practices extending from the twentieth-century radical grassroots form of UK ‘licensed squatting’ through to more recent for-profit examples. It also highlights the differential impacts and implications of commercial and non-commercialised forms of meanwhile use to reinforce their interdependency with wider urban renewal policies processes and conditions — radical or otherwise.

The aim of this paper is to develop a short, critical reflection on the use of temporary uses in the improvement and activation of public spaces. It considers the motivating factors behind the promotion or restriction of these practices, and how these might connect or impede broader goals of social justice. Attracting the attention and skills of urban planners and designers, temporary uses have gradually misled their role and capabilities: the imposition of new rules, standards and regulations has gradually tamed the informality, vitality, spontaneity and creativity of temporariness. To this end, this note argues that the aestheticization of temporary and tactical urbanism may have negative, indirect effects, reinforcing dominant views and normative beliefs of order, legitimacy, and spatial control.

The French national railway company (SNCF), the second largest real estate owner in France, has been using its properties for temporary artistic uses since the 1980s. From an initially alternative and pragmatic practice, temporary occupation has gradually become a strategic new activity used by the company to meet urban and real estate challenges. In 2015, the creation of SNCF Immobilier—a new real estate branch within SNCF—marked a turning point in the company’s activity. SNCF Immobilier allows cultural operators to take up temporary occupation of some of its vacant sites, before the arrival of the permanent urban project. Called ‘transient urbanism’, this approach refers to temporary projects carried out specifically on sites intended to host an urban project, in order to initiate the urban transformation and to foreshadow the arrival of the project. This new concept of transient urbanism illustrates the shift from temporary occupation in urban planning and real estate practices, involving multiple strategic issues and informing new reflection by owners on the transformation of their property. This growing appropriation by public and private actors contributes to the dissemination of transient urbanism as reproducible good practice, in the context of keen interest in temporary projects over the past five years in the Greater Paris area.

A vast continent with rich cultural traditions, Asia is steeped in its extraordinary heritage of places, ranging from the majestic monasteries in the high plateaus of Tibet to the multicultural streetscapes of George Town on the island of Penang. For ages, these memorable and remarkable sites have evolved through exchanges of cultures and the economic and social life of their communities. They embody systems of cultural values and spatial practices that are integral to the local ways of life and the identities of those places. For much of recent history, however, these longstanding practices of place-making in Asia were disrupted by a multitude of changes, conflicts, colonisa-tion, and rapid economic development, and through institutions imposed on the local communities, including none other than the professional planning and design practice. Over time, vernacular practices gave way to imposed economic and political imperatives. Human-scale places were demolished and replaced by large-scale developments. The city at eye level was transformed by policies at the high level. This chapter examines placemaking as a contemporary presents alternatives to institutionalized planning and design. It further examines challenges facing placemaking as a potentially emancipatory spatial practice.

Our discussion brings together expertise in alternative practices for using spaces, in temporal futures beyond a purely growth-oriented directions. The discussion circles around basic forces behind individual practices and their enabling or hindering factors. It will then work towards their embeddedness in contemporary institutional settings and our shared responsibility against global challenges. At the end, the conclusion will deliver starting points for the audience to be themselves part of larger changes and to become flexible minds who start taking actions for alternative visions and a sustainable long-term urban future.

This article explores nomadic site occupation as a form of planetary colonization involving both human and non-human agents. Conventional understandings of temporary occupation are often humancentric with little attention paid to the disruption of extant site ecologies and processes. The latter are particularly pressing concerns in nomadic settlements located in precarious landscapes. Taking the latter as its focus, this article engages the earth as an agent resisting its own colonization in the Australian-licensed squatter settlement known colloquially as Tin City. Located within the largest mobile sand dune structure in New South Wales, Tin City is an assemblage of several self-built fishing shacks accommodating a nomadic population. Its occupants engage in a daily battle against the shifting sands that threaten to subsume their temporary homes. Located in an area of significant indigenous heritage, the Tin City settlement has become a tourist attraction shrouded in local lore. Current discourses about it and its architectures generally focus on its unusual aesthetics, its contested sociopolitical histories and its ecology, with some discussion on the impacts of European colonization on the sand dune’s dynamic geomorphology. To concentrate on the latter, the article develops and deploys the posthumanist conceptualization of the earth posited by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his ficto-critical text <i>Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials</i>. Negarestani ascribes the earth with sentient and agentic capacity, whilst the nomads who traverse its surfaces become the penultimate planetary colonizers. Tin City’s occupation thus becomes a story of colonization and resistance narrated by the earth itself, and a reminder that the production and consumption of architectural forms does not need to be confined to that which is conventionally human.

In much of the traditional literature, abandoned spaces are seen as anomalies in urban evolution and the " solution " to this would be its regeneration, however, the current urban scenario allows us to understand the obsolescence and ruin of spaces as a constant process in the urban landscape and to understand them as such, is necessary to take advantage of aspects of abandonment and to use them as a tool for new city possibilities. The present research chooses the city of Lisbon as the beginning of study and follows the analysis by other European cities that, faced with the obsolete, have changed their approach and created innovative ways of intervention. In the Parque das Nações project there was a tabula rasa in the territory; the Braço de Prata complex had new approaches from an interruption of the project due to the bureaucracy and the crisis of the zone of the Euro; and the zone of the Manutenção Militar, after Idle and partially abandoned decades, will be reused from new concepts and new approaches, will be the cases of initial studies for the discussion on the process of ruining and the paradigm shift in the understanding of obsolete spaces. These are spaces of Military and Industrial origin that have become a scenario for intervention projects, undergoing modifications according to the political and economic scenario, in others words, the oil crisis in 1973 generated a system of abandoned or idle industrial spaces, which allowed the elaboration of a series of regeneration projects during the 1980s and 1990s, but the economic crisis of the 2000s interrupted investments and forced cities to seek alternatives to traditional projects. Contextualizing, the creation of the Parque das Nações neighborhood took place in conjunction with the experience of the 1998 Lisbon International Exhibition (EXPO'98), transforming a zone of polluting industries and idle military warehouses into an area of mixed uses focused on the residential and services sectors. It was decided to keep nothing of the existing structure, all factories and warehouses were demolished, only remaining a Cracking tower of an oil refinery that appears as a pseudo-landmark in the urban landscape; A failed attempt to remember an area of full amnesia. This view of the old idle industrial spaces in the urban territory, as something that is disrupting the city and that needs to disappear at