1 Reimagining Space-Time in the Temporary City Ella Harris Royal Holloway, University of London PhD Geography, September 2017 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Ella Harris, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed:________________ Date:__________________ 3 Contents Title page 1 Declaration of Authorship 2 Contents page 3 Abstract 5 Figures 6 Acknowledgments 8 Chapter One: Introducing the Temporary City 9 Chapter Two: Literature Review: Approaching Imaginaries of Pop-up Space-Time 27 Chapter Three: Conceptual Framework: Theorising the Temporary City 47 Part One: Pop-up Space-Time 50 Part Two: Spatiotemporal Imaginaries, Structures of Feeling, Compensatory Narratives 64 Chapter Four: Methods: Interacting with Space-Time 75 Part One: Creative Mediums and Space-Time 79 Part Two: i-Docs and Nonlinearity 91 Part Three: Practical Engagements 106 Chapter Five: Pop-up Cinema: Immersive Imaginaries and Urban Interactivity 143 Part One: Immersion as Serious Play 153 Part Two: Immersion and Interactivity: Nonlinear Assemblages 174 Part Three: Any-City-Whatever 192 Chapter Six: Container Spaces: Flexibility, Interstitiality, Precarity 205 Part One: Netil Market: Crafted Containers 210 Part Two: Grow Up: The New Efficiency 229 4 Part Three: Paradise Yard and the Artworks: Interstitial Spaces and the Politics of Visibility 242 Chapter Seven: Supper Clubs: Imaginaries of Secrecy and Surprise in London’s ‘Underground’ Dining Scene 262 Part One: Secrecy: Selling Domestic Space 266 Part Two: Supper Clubs and the Surprising City 292 Chapter Eight: Imagining Pop-up Futures: Conclusion 307 Bibliography 316 Accompanying methodological material available to view at: thetemporarycity.com Password: TTC 5 Abstract This thesis explores “pop-up” culture in London, drawing on research conducted in 2014 and 2015. Pop-up refers to a trend for temporary, mobile and interstitial places. Since the 2008 recession, pop-up has become increasingly influential in London, and internationally, as a place-making strategy. It has been embraced by multiple stakeholders including creative practitioners, businesses, local governments, housing developers and charities. I argue that, as pop-up becomes a routine and acclaimed way of producing cities, it is crucial to question the impacts of and agendas behind this celebration of the ephemeral, flexible and unpredictable. Pop-up is, most centrally, a format for places of entertainment and consumption. Empirically, this thesis focuses on three prominent kinds of pop-up geography in London; pop-up cinemas, shipping container architectures and supper clubs. By examining a series of case studies within these three ‘types’, I offer central insights into how pop-up imagines and distributes urban space-time. I explore the spatiotemporal imaginaries developed and deployed in pop-up culture and question what those imaginaries enable, and for whom, in the climate of precarity it emerged from. Conceptually, I investigate five ways that pop-up imagines space-time; as immersive, as flexible, as interstitial, as secret and as surprising. I also consider three dimensions of what these imaginaries do. I explore how pop-up’s imaginaries engage sensitivities to space-time as nonlinear, how they can alter precarity as a structure of feeling and how they function as compensatory narratives that make palatable, even desirable, diminished conditions of urban life in times of crisis. Methodologically, the thesis experiments with interactive documentary, a web-based, nonlinear form of multi-media documentary, as a way to investigate imaginaries of space-time. The core argument of the thesis is that pop-up responds to turbulence in the city with nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginaries that normalise, and thereby stabilise without ‘fixing’, precarious urban conditions. 6 Figures Figure One: PLACE/Ladywell, Pop-Up Social Housing (RSA, 2015) Figure Two: Time-Out Pop-up Generator (Time Out, 2014) Figure Three: Paris: Ville Invisible (Latour, 2017) Figure Four: Journal of Insomnia: Still Interior (Insomnia Journal, 2017) Figure Five: Journal of Insomnia: Time out of Joint (Insomnia Journal, 2017) Figure Six: Gaza Sderot: Time (Gaza Sderot, 2017) Figure Seven: Gaza Sderot: Maps (Gaza Sderot, 2017) Figure Eight: Adapted Container (Author’s image) Figure Nine: Redevelopment Billboard in Brentford (Author’s image) Figure Ten: Bird Tattoos (Author’s image) Figure Eleven: Editing Pulp Kitchen (Author’s image) Figure Twelve: Now-here (Author’s image) Figure Thirteen: The Floating Cinema (Hobhouse, 2015) Figure Fourteen: Record the Sounds of Brentford (Possible Sounds to Record: Trains, boats, wildlife, capitalism, sports, fountains, gentrification, machinery, austerity, accents, airplanes, apathy) (Author’s image) Figure Fifteen: Outside Pop-Up City, Immersive Experiences (Author’s image) Figure Sixteen: Map sent by Secret Cinema (Email correspondence with Secret Cinema, 2014) Figure Seventeen: Gapped Up – Strap it on (Author’s image) 7 Figure Eighteen: Lyon Estates, Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985) Figure Nineteen: WeAreArrow (Vrhovnik, 2015) Figure Twenty: Pop-up People (Author’s image) Figure Twenty One: The End of Pop-Up City (Author’s image) Figure Twenty Two: Grow up Box (Growup 2017) Figure Twenty Three: Grow Up Aquaponics (Growup 2017) Figure Twenty Four: Containerization Stage 2 (Author’s image) Figure Twenty Five: Supper Club Doors (Author’s image) Figure Twenty Six: The Ship’s Kitchen (Author’s image) Figure Twenty Seven: Colonise the Waterways (Author’s image) Figure Twenty Eight: Eat Global, Meet Local (Author’s image) 8 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Harriet Hawkins for her always inspiring and motivating supervision of my PhD research, as well as my advisor Professor Phil Crang, and Dr Oli Mould, who both offered invaluable advice and support. The thinking required for this thesis owes much to the Social, Cultural and Historical Geography research Group at Royal Holloway (SCHG), which has been such a stimulating intellectual environment and a real pleasure to be part of. My collaborative academic relationship, and friendship, with Mel Nowicki has been a particularly important source of inspiration and I’m grateful to Mel for all the (somehow very enjoyable, while also depressing) time we’ve spent discussing precarity as a contemporary condition. Special thanks are due to Michael Skelly for his generosity and technical expertise in helping to produce the Interactive Documentary submitted with this thesis, as part of the methodology. I am also grateful to the AHRC for funding my research as well as for additional funding from the Royal Holloway SCHG. Lastly, I am so appreciative of the numerous friends and family who supported me through the PhD process, be it practically, intellectually or emotionally, including (but not limited to); Oliver Harris, Jenny Harris, Mia Harris, Nina Harris, Aime Williams, Signy Gutnick Allen, Matthew Parsfield, Priyesh Mistry and Jack Scott. Huge thanks, also, to everyone at Combat Temple boxing club (and in particular Anthony Campbell) for providing the place that kept me sane for the past four years. 9 Chapter One Introducing the Temporary City When I started this research, few people had heard the term ‘pop-up’. Pop-up would usually need explaining before I could proceed in describing my work to somebody or exploring the phenomenon in a conference paper or journal article. Four years on, pop-up is a widely recognised phenomenon amongst diverse bodies of people including governments, charities, arts and cultural organisations as well as multiple segments of the general population. When I say that I work on pop-up culture I now get nods rather than quizzical stares. In the past 18 months especially pop-up’s ubiquity and significance has increased even further. One marker of its current prominence in the UK, and London in particular, is the fact that in February 2016 the Conservative Greater London Authority (GLA) proposed pop-up housing as the answer to London’s housing crisis (Boff, 2016). Their report, entitled ‘Pop-up Housing, a London Solution’, suggested that because it ‘will take years’ before many sold off sites in London are developed, it is prudent to use them ‘in the meantime’ to provide a ‘range of housing schemes whilst developers await long-term planning permission’ (Boff, 2016, p. 5). Their proposition follows the format that has, over the past decade, become known as ‘pop-up’; their intention is that sites awaiting redevelopment be used to provide much needed housing, but only temporarily, so as not to preclude the profitable sale and development of those sites in the future. The GLA describe three existing pop-up housing sites, one of which is social housing (PLACE/Ladywell), one housing for the homeless (YCube) and another for graduates (Heijmans One Scheme, Amsterdam). These are all schemes that provide modular, mobile housing for demographics in need, yet while the schemes provide this needed resource, they are only intended to exist in the ‘meantime’ to the timescales of more profitable developments. 10 Pop-up culture has, since the 2008 recession, taken London by storm. As indicated above, it refers to the temporary use of vacant buildings or sites for services and activities. Traditionally, these activities have been in the cultural and commercial sectors, including venues like bars, restaurants, cinemas and galleries. Recently, however, pop-up has expanded to include many welfare services such as housing, libraries, health centres and, soon, courts of law. The GLA’s proposal perhaps marks the culmination of pop-up’s promotion as a solution both to the rejuvenation of vacant urban sites and the provision of underfunded services and amenities. Pop-up has been so celebrated that it is now perceived as not only an economical way to provide arts and cultural events but even to supply essential services such as housing. Figure One: PLACE/Ladywell, Pop-Up Social Housing As well as indicating the growing prominence of pop-up, the GLA’s report demonstrates what is at stake as the pop-up imaginary takes hold of cities.