Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city

Abstract

This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the ‘post-crisis city’ and the political economy of ‘austerity urbanism’. The focus of the discussion is on practical interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way, it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that re-work orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realized through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the region's largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces that seek to create a kind of ‘durability through the temporary’.

Keywords:

• austerity
• temporary use
• interstitial urbanism
• urban design

Acknowledgements

This paper originates from a presentation to the ‘Make_Shift: The Expanded Field of Critical Spatial Practice’ International Conference held at the TU Berlin Institute for Architecture, 6 October 2012, and co-organized by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Urban Drift Projects and TU Berlin. My particular thanks go Francesca Ferguson of Urban Drift and Jörg Stollmann of TU Berlin.

Notes

http://fbpeopleslibrary.co.uk/

As the West Kensington and Gibbs Green Tenants and Residents Associations note, of their campaign against the proposed redevelopment of the Earls Court site and nearby estates in West London, ‘The developer and the Council are hurling £50,000 a day at us. Thanks to our campaign, the Council's and the developer's lawyers and financial consultants are raking in a fortune. But, we're bleeding the scheme dry.’ http://westkengibbsgreen.wordpress.com/

‘Nous sommes ce commun: faire, produire, participer, se mouvoir, partager, circuler, enrichir, inventer, relancer’ (Revel and Negri 2007, 9).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fran Tonkiss

Fran Tonkiss is Reader in Sociology and Director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. Email: [email protected]