Fortress London: Why We Need to Save the Country from its Capital

contribute to the formation and development of new political alliances’ (113). Policies of austerity combined with economic depression made the idea of the ‘temporary’ a potent area of discourse during the period in which Ferreri’s research was completed. Ferreri shows systematically but also with great nuance where the ‘profound disconnect’ (141) between temporariness and the realities and dynamics of everyday life in a city such as London. Temporariness in this sense is a fuel for what Ferreri terms a ‘resurgent entrepreneurial urban agenda’ (142). At times, art and culture have provided a smokescreen for the very real harms done to London’s communities by rapid urban profiteering. Ultimately she warns us against the any hope for the transgressive potential of ephemerality: ‘Temporary urbanism redefines modes of relation to the city and to urban dynamics through an entrepreneurial gaze that sees places as underused assets’ (160). This book is rightly pessimistic about any claimed positives arising from temporariness in the city. Ferreri believes that the conditions of transformation that might create justice in London are necessarily revolutionary: ‘space and time need to be reclaimed’ (168). This book is an essential account of a period of time in which London embraced newpatterns of urban development. The language of crisis that fuelled the use of austerity to justify the wholesale transformation of the welfare state is mirrored in this account of temporariness in London. Amore precarious and unjust set of conditions have been presented to the people who live and work in the city as a glamorous future, but Ferreri has carefully demonstrated that this promise was an illusion. I do wonder if there might have been more scope to explore the radical possibilities of ephemerality in the final chapter of the book. I was left thinking of Judith Butler’s writing on precarious life, the notion that precarity is at once a fundamental quality of life and a something that when distributed unevenly is a source of great injustice. The politics of scarcity and private ownership are perhaps the greater villain than the temporary per se. This said, Ferreri’s argument is robust and persuasive throughout, and I may be falling into the same trap that she describes so well.