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Re-thinking the post-crash city: vacant space, temporary use and new urban imaginaries?
Analysing a range of policy documents and drawing on engagements with a wide range of stakeholders, this chapter demonstrates in her chapter that there exist considerable inconsistencies and tensions when it comes to the urban imaginaries being played out over Longyearbyen in particular. However, while on the one hand the chapter she identifies an imaginary strongly tied to the precautionary principle as being strongly present with the Norwegian authorities, it also hints at a range of processes that underlie alternative, bottom-up and co-creative processes of producing urban imaginaries.
Abstract Cities are lived and made and constantly in a state of flux, and the same urban spaces can be used by a variety of people in very different ways. I propose the concept of ‘liquid urbanisms’ to understand these provisional uses of urban space. Liquid urbanisms are provisional places and spaces, connected through the loose and flexible networks of people and projects, that are not immediately obvious but which solidify around a certain project or topic, then become liquid again, until another time in the future. Liquid urbanisms was a helpful concept for me in my research, but also has a wider resonance in how we think about and conceptualise provisional locations in the city. Liquid urbanisms builds on and adds to work in urban studies, focusing attention on the spatial practices of urban actors at the local scale and acknowledging the importance of the temporal in understanding space and place and acknowledging the fluidity of cities. My research conducted in 2013–17 in Dublin initially looked at so‐called ‘temporary spaces’ but quickly grew to include parks, squats, art spaces, urban gardens, autonomous social centres, networking groups and direct actions. I created the conceptual framework of liquid urbanisms to be able to discuss these projects together, as empirically from my research I could see that the projects I was researching had two main shared characteristics: a looser understanding of temporality than existed in mainstream urban planning understandings of the city, and a shared network of people, places and resources, but no body of literature encompassed both of these characteristics. The focus of this article is the concept of liquid urbanisms and how the framework of liquid urbanisms can highlight the different temporalities, spatialities and networks that exist in city spaces, reminding scholars to pay attention to the diverse fluidity of cities.
Geographers have a responsibility to address the major challenges of our time by engaging with and shaping policy. The paper introduces three ways this might be achieved – through critical engagement with policy; through occupying liminal spaces that foster agenda setting; and through empowering others to shape policy-from-below. Drawing on a range of experiences related to urban and regional development, the challenges and opportunities of engaging with the policy world are discussed. The paper concludes with a call to strive for a geography of possibility where our discipline is recognized as critical to solving social, economic and environmental challenges.
Traditional markets represent vital spaces of opportunity for livelihood-building, intercultural contact and for developing familiarity with the city. Yet, worldwide, markets are under pressure due to redevelopment agendas driven by neoliberalised forms of urban governance. Although precarious sites of occupation and employment, markets still maintain an attractiveness for immigrant micro-entrepreneurs as a foothold into the labour market and urban economy. Through a case study of the historic Moore Street market in central Dublin (Ireland), we explore the experiences of immigrant entrepreneurs. While these may be different in terms of their familiarity with the urban, institutional and regulatory landscapes, they are not entirely dissimilar from the experiences of longer-term traders in Moore Street. However what is evident is how precarity is tactically exploited by newcomer entrepreneurs for particular reasons. These traders prize the autonomy brought by market trading and use it as a meso-scale between low-paid waged employment and higher-level employment that may be out of reach for a variety of reasons. We argue that in examining urban precarity, increased attention should be paid to exploring the context-specific nature of the processes that give rise to it as well as the agentic capacity exercised to exploit it even within structural constraints.
Across Europe, economic development is increasingly focused on large city regions intensifying processes of metropolitanization. However, the trajectories and experience of these processes are context dependent, shaped by the broad political-economic context and public policy frameworks. Drawing on case studies of Warsaw (Poland) and Dublin (Ireland), this paper examines the relationship between the transformation of the metropolitan spatial structure (through a focus on secondary business districts) and public policy at the metropolitan scale. Unlike the majority of Secondary Business Districts across Europe, the two selected cases (Sluzewiec and Sandyford) have evolved organically over time. Based on desk research and interviews with local stakeholders, the paper explores the evolution of these districts in the context of public policy choices within multi-level governance and public-private frameworks. The paper concludes by highlighting the role of public policy within secondary business district formation and evolution, and the implications for the broader metropolitan area. ARTICLE HISTORY
Temporary uses are claimed to be new solutions for urban challenges, especially in a scenario characterized by scarce public-private resources. However, the role of temporariness in urban development is still ambiguous. The paper discusses the concept of temporary urbanism in the light of urban regeneration, other problematic concepts. The paper addresses current urban phenomena proposing a taxonomy of temporary uses to help clarify these ambiguities, highlighting differences and similarities among various European cases. Notably, the contribution aims to discuss whether temporary urbanism can be considered as a new method of urban regeneration or as a tool to perpetrate neoliberal policies.
Brenner and Schmid’s planetary urbanization thesis has been a tipping point in recent debates regarding the conceptual directions of urban studies. Various interventions have raised questions about whether urban theories and concepts can, and indeed whether they should, be transferrable across diverse contexts, and which processes count as constitutive rather than merely the outcome of urbanization. While planetary urbanization opens up new questions for urban theory, critics have highlighted the problematic ways in which the epistemology may close off difference. In this paper, I argue for the need to take a provisional approach to urban theory, particularly in conceptualizing post-crisis urban transformations. Firstly, I put recent theories of planetary urbanization into dialogue with what I call provisional approaches to reflect on the relationship between theory and empirical context in addressing post-crisis urbanization and urban politics. I then argue that urban ruins offer a useful lens to consider these questions because of how theories of ruination emphasize the importance of place in the production of space. The ruin, unlike other forms of abstract space, is intrinsically dependent on local social and historical context in which it was produced. Following this, I draw on an analysis and discussion of ‘ghost estates’ and contestations over the reuse of vacant spaces in the period following Ireland’s crisis to illustrate how difference is generative of post-crisis urbanization and urban politics.
The scale and severity of property crashes following the global financial crisis has made vacancy a more visible and politically significant feature of cities. Although research has focused on urban experiments in vacant spaces, there has been less emphasis on how the contested property relations around vacancy remake urban governance. In this paper, we argue that debates about vacancy have been a central concern in post-crisis urban governance. In the first part of the paper we draw two conceptual approaches into a dialogue and apply them to an analysis of vacant space: that of Nicholas Blomley on property and Elizabeth Povinelli on “alternative social projects”. In the second part of the paper, we critically analyse how three groups discursively construct the need to “activate” and “re-use” vacant spaces in Dublin: grassroots groups, urban policy-makers, and financial actors. We argue that governing vacancy will be a key feature of post-crisis urbanisation.
There has been a dramatic increase in vacant and derelict land and buildings, particularly in post-industrial cities. In parallel, the scale and variety of temporary – or meanwhile or interim – urban uses have grown rapidly. Extant research has provided much up-to-date, detailed information about temporary uses, processes and actors, and about interim spaces as sites of urban experimentation. However, rigorous, theoretically informed, critical analysis and appraisal of such uses and spaces have been limited and have tended to view alternative approaches more favourably than mainstream approaches. Consequently, insufficient attention has been given to the relations between transience and permanence, the impact that temporary uses may have on existing modes of production and regulation, and how such uses may best contribute to urban change. The book draws on international experience to address these issues from the perspectives of the law, sociology, human geography, urban studies, planning and real estate.
Urban resilience can be understood as the application of social-ecological systems thinking to the city in order to build adaptive capacity to change in urban systems. Vacant sites can become the focus of explorations into how to adapt and do things differently, for example in response to a housing crisis or recession. This paper explores the mapping of vacant sites as an example of urban resilience in practice using two approaches: the re-examination of historical precedents of vacant sites mapping in Edinburgh and Dublin influenced by Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), and related engagement with vacant sites in Philadelphia; and investigation of case studies of the contemporary practice in these same three cities in the context of Geddesian thinking and the contemporary discourse on urban resilience. Geddes is considered of particular relevance to urban resilience as his theories and practice also applied an understanding of social-ecological systems to the city.
The related issues of vacancy, redundancy and dereliction in the city, raise questions about the conflict between private profit and social use, between exchange values and use values. This paper offers a typology of the causes and forms of vacancy and is the first attempt to map this phenomenon for nineteenth-century Dublin. It also reviews some of the contemporary debates about the management of empty and decrepit buildings and sites. The charge of wastefulness was weighty and suggested strategies that are relevant yet today. These include compulsory purchase, a tax on emptiness, informal occupation, and the temporary appropriation of un-used spaces for socially-useful purposes.
Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re) building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic façades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine. Although these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first 15 years of Berlin’s post-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center might replace this former GDR parliamentary building. Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms that led down into those sites. Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn It One More Time (2006–2008), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the division.
The articles in this special section, by offering ethnographically grounded reflections on diverse strains of economic activism, begin to articulate a non-capitalocentric political ecology that we think can help scholaractivists politicize, reimagine, and recreate socio-ecological relations. In this introductory article, we offer a useful vision of how scholar-activists can engage with and support more just and sustainable ways of organizing human–human and human–environment relations. Specifically, we argue that engaged researchers can significantly contribute to a meaningful "ecological revolution" by (1) examining the tremendously diverse, already-existing experiments with other ways of being in the world, (2) helping to develop alternative visions, analyses, narratives, and desires that can move people to desire and adopt those ways of being, and (3) actively supporting and constructing economies and ecologies with alternative ethical orientations. Each article in this collection attempts one or more of these goals, and this introductory article provides a conceptual grounding for these ethnographic studies and a synthesis of some of their primary contributions. We begin by describing why critique is analytically and politically inadequate and explain why we think a non-capitalocentric ontology offers an essential complement for engaged scholarship. We then turn to the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective in order to explain how ideas of overdetermination, diverse economies, and performativity better equip the field of political ecology to contribute to alternative futures. And finally, we discuss how the articles in this volume reconceptualize values, politics, and scale in a manner that illuminates our scholarly and activist efforts.
Keywords: non-capitalism, political ecology, alternative economies, capitalism, scale, values, politics, Gibson-Graham
Since the 1980s, city governments have increasingly focused on the adaptive reuse of brownfield sites to address urban dereliction through top-down policy guidance and funding initiatives. Since the onset of the economic and banking crisis in 2008, this approach has become more difficult and one response has been the encouragement of 'meanwhile uses' through the introduction of temporary activities on brownfield sites, as short-term alternatives (Bishop and Williams 2012). Much of these activities have been influenced by creative city debates centred on artists, the arts and creativity as important economic tools and agents (Florida 2005; Pratt 2008). However this focus ignores the wider contributions to urbanism of such activities, often in marginal locations. Focusing on the city of Dublin, this chapter examines the pop-up Granby Park. This park was developed on a site formerly targeted for social housing but a victim of the crisis and collapse of the property market. The development of this park by a creative collective, Upstart, challenged how we think about vacancy in the city and highlights the potential and challenges of more informal but creative types of governance in the city.
Temporary land uses have become the focus of much debate within academic and policy circles in recent years. Although the international literature contains numerous case studies of temporary interventions, little attention has been paid to the dynamics of the interactions among different stakeholders. This paper reports on a stakeholder workshop that used a participatory research approach to collectively define the issues facing those interested in the potential of vacant urban sites. The paper outlines the goals, design and evaluation of the workshop and concludes with a discussion of suggested lessons for practice that emerged from the workshop sessions.
Urban environments are in continual transition. Yet, as many cities continue to grow and develop in ways deemed typical or standard, these transitions can be difficult to acknowledge. Narratives of continued growth and permanence become accepted and expected while the understanding of urban dynamics becomes lost. In many parts of the world, the shrinking cities phenomenon has given rise to a new awareness of urban transition that provides a laboratory of new conditions at the intersection of urbanism and ecology. With property vacancy rates easily exceeding 50% in certain locations, cities in the American Rust Belt look more like successional woodlands than bustling metropolises, yet these cities still contain significant numbers of urban residents. A central question that arises from this phenomenon is: how can vacant land, through the provision of ecosystem services, become a resource as opposed to a liability? This paper looks to recent studies in urban ecology as a lens for understanding the land use potential of shrinking cities, while discussing unconventional solutions for sustainable development of urban land.
This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's ‘ghost estates’ – residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash – and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the ‘ghost estate’ functioned as an ‘empty signifier’ through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by ‘ghost estates’: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of ‘excess’. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.
So-called temporary uses of urban space, including ‘pop ups’ or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of vacancy. Yet the ways in which these urban innovations are conceived, studied and evaluated continue to reify a capitalist framework of development and conceptual understanding of the city that valorises exchange value and permanence. The result is that little empirical research exists about smaller projects that offer the city and its residents many non-monetary benefits. In this article, we argue that evaluating urban space according to the dichotomy of permanent or temporary land use is problematic: it misses the fluidity and multiple rhythms of how places are made and spaces experienced that are inherent to the regular life of any city. Rather than temporary use, we use the concept of ‘interim space’ to consider projects that may be responsive to local needs and available resources. Such initiatives often include ‘non-visible’ advantages which stem from use values, healthy place-making and creating shared spaces, offer alternative economies, and provide residents and guests with new ways of imagining their neighbourhood and city. To make our arguments, we analyse Granby Park, a ‘pop up’ park in north Dublin, initiated by the artistic collective Upstart that was open to the public in the summer of 2013, using qualitative research conducted before, during and after the official time the park was open. To begin a conversation about new frameworks of analysis that might capture the intricacies of interim urban spaces such as Granby Park, we conclude by offering a new concept, the ‘improvisional city’, to encourage more empirical research that takes seriously the many tangible and intangible benefits of these initiatives.
Since 2007, like many other places, Ireland has experienced a series of economic and social shocks. These were brought on by an over-reliance on property development and debt as a means of development. One of the ways in which these shocks were made evident was through the over-production of housing and other properties across the island. While there has been research conducted on this form of overproduction, there has been less on longer standing forms of dereliction and vacancy. Such derelict buildings and vacant sites are a prominent feature of Dublin city’s landscape. They remain part of a city that has undergone significant transformation in the last two decades. In an effort to understand why they remain in place, we undertook a survey of this dereliction in 2013 and 2014. In the first part of the paper, we outline the origins and aims of our survey: to understand why dereliction persists particularly in one part of Dublin city. In the second part, we describe the methods we used to gather data on individual derelict sites and our attempts to engage a wider audience through an online collaborative process. Our research shows that the collection of data on derelict sites in Dublin is often made difficult by opaque planning practice. The paper concludes that the apparent disorder of the city seen in derelict properties can be recast if we more fully understand what the relationship between use, or usefulness, and that order might be. Possible uses for these sites are often elided in favour of the ordered practices of a network of actors. Re-thinking Dublin city after the crisis requires us to understand how public engagement for planning purposes can be improved.
In Dublin there are many needs and desires which are not met, or excluded, by the pattern of high rent, the commodification of social/cultural life, and the regulation of public space. Against this dynamic, Dublin has seen a number of experiments in urban commoning: people collectively finding ways of opening up space in order to do what they want. This might be as simple as wanting a space to work, to make food or to show films. Rather than trying to change this situation by appealing to existing institutions, these new urban commons are characterized by particular groups of people devising practical ways of escaping the forms of “enclosure” which limit what can happen in the city. This article takes a “militant research” approach to explore the potentials and limitations of these experiments in urban production and organization.
In spite of the amount of urban development that followed the Fall of the Wall, Berlin's urban landscape has remained filled with a large amount of “voids” and disused sites, which have gradually been occupied by various individuals, groups, or entrepreneurs for “temporary” or “interim” uses (such as urban beach bars). This paper analyzes how, and why, such temporary uses of space have been harnessed in recent economic and urban development policies and in the official city marketing discourse in Berlin post‐2000, in the context of the discursive and policy shift toward the promotion of Berlin as a “creative city.” The gradual process of enlistment of new forms of cultural and social expression by policy‐makers and real estate developers for urban development and place marketing purposes has put pressure on the very existence and experimental nature of “temporary uses” and “interim spaces.” These have consequently been going through various trajectories of displacement, transformation, commodification, resistance, or disappearance, and in particular cases have become the focus of intense local conflicts.
Drawing upon collaborative planning theory and on the work of Lefebvre and de Certeau, this paper explores the multistage governance arrangements leading to the employment of temporary uses as an instrument for regeneration in a context of economic crisis. It contributes to a thorough understanding of the relations between the power hierarchy and the strategy/tactics developed through a more or less inclusive collaborative process from place-shaping (weak planning) to place-making (masterplanning). By decrypting the different paths that can be taken by the collaborative process, the paper demonstrates how temporary uses on differential spaces shape space from a use value point of view, influence and challenge the distribution of power and enable (temporary) occupants to acquire and sometimes sustain a position in the place-making process.
The task for critical urban research is to analyze processes of neoliberalization “on the ground”. This paper examines—based on original empirical research—in how far the outsourcing of former local state responsibilities for public services and urban infrastructure is expressed in the promotion of community gardening in Berlin (Germany). It shows the contradictory outcomes: on the one hand, a failing strategy of outsourcing towards residents and the opening up of opportunity structures for other interests. On the other hand it shows how far the emergence of open green spaces maintained by volunteers can only be understood against the background of “roll-back” neoliberal urban politics and that their rationality cannot be separated from “roll-out neoliberalism”.
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