‘Not a pop-up!’

Abstract

In recessional London, the celebration of pop-up art spaces plays an important part in the official narrative of temporary use as countercultural, secretive, transgressive and slightly illicit. This chapter mobilises the standpoint of visual and performative arts practitioners to analyse motivations and constraints in lawful and unlawful negotiations to access vacant spaces and their position within wider geographies of urban change. Through longitudinal case studies, it discusses tensions between community-oriented and career-oriented temporary practices and how these play out in relation to shifting cultural and urban policy. The selfreflexive experiences of practitioners reveal a critique of the ‘pop-up’ logic and the role of entrepreneurial space activators in the cracks of the creative city.