The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism

Normalising Precarity in Austerity London

Mara Ferreri

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English

Routledge
01 December 2025

Interdisciplinary studies; Urban communities

Series: Cities and Cultures

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.

By: Mara Ferreri
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 360g
ISBN: 9781041188674
ISBN 10: 1041188676
Series: Cities and Cultures
Pages: 194
Publication Date: 01 December 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Mara Ferreri is an urban and cultural geographer. She is VC Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University, UK, and is the co-author of Notes from the Temporary City (Public Works, 2016).

Reviews for The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London

This is an excellent book. The author combines an analysis of the complex narratives and policy rhetoric surrounding the temporary uses of urban space, with an in-depth ethnographic observation of practices of temporary use and their perceptions by various stakeholders. She embeds the London field work in contemporary debates and recent scholarship from urban and cultural geography, urban studies, architectural and planning studies, in a perceptive and refined manner, leading to powerful conclusions about the ambiguous role of temporary uses of space in a post-austerity, neoliberal city where precarious forms of living and working have become dominant.'-Professor Claire Colomb, The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London