The Normalisation of Temporariness

Abstract

The concluding chapter examines the mechanisms that have normalised temporary urban practices since the 2008 global financial crisis and their relationship to longer-term cultural and economic shifts. Such normalisation combines a narrative construction of vacant spaces as a problem and a celebration of a projective logic of on-demand connectivity. It argues that temporary urbanism has ushered in a deeply problematic glamorisation of impermanence and ephemerality and a new ideal of urban life in which the anticipatory politics of precarity become normalised and celebrated. The imaginary of a ‘festivalisation of urban policy’ reveals an increase in planned spatial and temporal foreclosures in contemporary cities. The chapter concludes by offering a propositional cultural and political critique of temporariness at times of permanent uncertainty.