Temporary Urbanism: Activation, De-Activation and Adaptability within the Urban Environment

 

AAG Annual Meeting (New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018)

 

Organizers: Lauren Andres (School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham) [log in to unmask]; Yueming Zhang (School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham) [log in to unmask]  

 

Temporary uses of spaces, for various purposes (arts, leisure, food growing, etc.) have always been a key feature of the urban scene; their impact on urban development has been significant either acting as catalyst for transformation or gentrification, as burden through illicit perspectives, or as coping and informal mechanism for everyday resilience.

 

‘Temporary urbanism’ can be defined as any planned or unplanned actions designed and thought through with the ambition of activating a space in need of transformation and thus of impacting the surrounding socio-economic environment. Temporary urbanism involves adaptability and sits within a mix of time scales; it is connected to the planning system but is not solely limited to it. Temporary urbanism embraces diversity specially by involving a range of decision-makers and users and aiming to foster change by producing alternative visions and projects whose aim is not to be sustained but to evolve with the space and its users. Such urbanism requires specific skills and technics as it challenges existing ways of thinking about space production as a much more flexible and fluid process.

 

Temporary urbanism is all about urban studies. By essence it is a diverse and complex form of urbanism embedded within both unplanned (bottom-up) and planned (top-down) mechanisms. Research in this area has been extremely scattered and there is a need to look beyond the initial distinction of how the temporary has been triggered and to build a wider understanding of it towards a rethinking of adaptability in urban studies (including urban geography, urban planning, urban sociology, etc.) and how to theorise temporalities and adaptability in the production and re-production of space in both developed and developing contexts.

 

This session invites critical contributions aiming to engage with the field of temporary urbanism and examining topics including, but are not restricted to:

 

•             Theoretical and methodological developments about temporary urbanism

•             Temporary urbanism for activating or de-activating transformations of urban space

•             Unplanned and planned forms of temporary urbanism in both the global North and South

•             Temporary urbanism in relation to adaptability, resilience, informality, and everyday coping

•             Networks, power relationships and temporary uses

•             Crisis, austerity, and the makeshift city

•             Trans-/inter-disciplinary approach to conceptualize temporary urbanism

•             Developing understandings of the relation between temporalities and space through temporary urbanism

 

Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract conforming to the requirements of the AAG (see http://annualmeeting.aag.org/ ) by October 8 to Lauren Andres ([log in to unmask]) and Yueming Zhang ([log in to unmask]).

 

 

Dr. Yueming Zhang

Lecturer in Human Geography

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

University of Birmingham

Tel: +44 (0)121 414 2243

E-mail: [log in to unmask]

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/gees/zhang-yueming.aspx