Learning from temporary use and the making of on-demand communities in London’s Olympic “fringes”

ABSTRACT

Community-oriented temporary uses are a subset of interim use in vacant urban spaces, alongside creative and commercial practices. Its proponents argue that they can inform more incremental and residents-led local urban development. Under urban austerity, however, temporary uses can become vehicles for the short-term and conditional delivery of social benefits. In this paper, I analyse a community-oriented interim use project commissioned by a public development body as part of the London 2012 Olympic Games urban regeneration program. Drawing upon policy analysis and interviews with planners, policymakers, architects and community members, I unravel competing discourses, positions, power dynamics and temporalities, and their relationship to the Games’ legacy. The paper contributes to debates about the normalization of temporary urbanism and pop-up geographies in times of urban austerity, shedding light on the potential long-term implications of the logic of “on-demand communities” in urban development and planning.

KEYWORDS:

• London 2012 Olympic Games
• interim uses
• on-demand communities
• pop-up geographies
• urban regeneration

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all participants in the Re-valuing temporary urban use project and particularly my collaborator Andreas Lang, with whom I developed this study and discussed previous drafts of this paper. Thank you also to the participants of the workshop ‘Transience and Permanence in Urban Development’, University of Sheffield (2015), to Laura Flierl and to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On-site research was conducted between June 2014 and May 2015, complemented by archival and follow-up interviews in 2016 and 2019. In this paper, I draw directly and indirectly on interviews with three LLDC officers from the Design and Physical Regeneration team, two workers at The Yard Theatre, a local youth worker, a former local councillor, one of the architects of Hub67 and a volunteer member of the Hub67 steering group.

2. Wick Award. Retrieved from http://wickaward.co.uk/.

3. The high footfall did not materialize because Transport for London decided to alternate traffic at Hackney Wick Station to control passenger flow during the Games.

4. Frontside Gardens was presented as a positive case study in the “Interim Uses” section of the LLDC Local Plan (London Legacy Development Corporation, 2015).

5. The governance of the center involved a multi-stakeholder management structure and a voluntary steering group composed of residents, local and non-local professionals as well as members of the Hackney Wick Festival committee.

Additional information

Funding

The Re-valuing temporary urban use project was funded by Creativeworks London, AHRC-funded Knowledge Exchange Hub (2014). The writing of this article was further supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 6655919.