Cities in Time: Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City

This essay is concerned with the intersection of lived time, time as represented and urban space - especially around everyday practice. As such it follows in a long pedigree of works addressing time and space in the city. However, what I want to try and rethink some approaches to offer a less stable version of the everyday, and through this a sense of practice as an activity creating time-space not time space as some matrix within which activity occurs. The essay thus addresses the paradox that Stewart identifies where the ‘temporality of everyday life is marked by an irony which is its own creation, for this temporality is held to be ongoing and non-reversible and, at the same time characterized by repetition and predictability’ (1984, p14). I want to thus look both at stability but also the emergence of new possibilities through everyday temporality. To do this I want to proceed through four circuits, each picking up and expanding upon the previous, developing and transforming it. The first circuit serves to locate the everyday through the study of temporality. The study of the chronopolitics and regulation of daily life serves as an entree into why ‘the everyday’ matters. The multiple rhythms and temporalities of urban life this form the back-cloth for this essay; what Lefebvre evoked, but hardly explained, as a rhythmanalysis. The second circuit picks up on this but to adds the insights of time-geography in the paths and trajectories that individuals and groups make through the city. Introducing a sense of human action and motility into the experience of time offers a new step while the combination of time-space routines serves to link the everyday to the reproduction of social regularities (Pred 1982). However, the sense of time-space created through time geography is rather rarefied, so the third circuit seeks to develop a critique and step sidewise through a concern with the differences between lived and represented times - a focus on experiential time-space that will lead to considering phenomenological accounts. Time and space cease to be simply containers of action. These it will be suggested begin to offer a sense of space-time as Becoming, a sense of temporality as action, as performance and practice; indeed the difference as well as repetition. The possibility as Grosz (1999) argues for not merely the novel, but the unforeseen. However, the fourth circuit suggests that these still share an idea of the self-presence of everyday experience, and will open up ideas of events as problematising the everyday. This attempts to both keep a sense of fecundity in the everyday without it becoming a recourse to ground thinking in an ‘ultimate non-negotiable reality’ (Felski 2000:15). The essay then argues for a sense of greater instability - or perhaps better, fragility - within the everyday. This essay thus focuses on the flow of experience for the social subject. It is also important to think through the topology and texture of temporality in the urban fabric, the city as well as its people, but that is a task for a different occasion (see Crang & Travlou, 2001).

2019

Overlapping and interlinked dimensions of time are shaped by and, in turn, structure contemporary urbanization and everyday life. This Special Feature debates the implications of such temporal dynamics for our cities: It explores the making of temporalities, the power relations in and through which this process is embedded, and the inequalities that its effects entail. Beyond definitions that focus on the material characteristics of infrastructures, the Special Feature understands temporalities themselves as infrastructures: structures that underlie and powerfully shape current forms of social organization and interaction. Considering time through this analytic lens promises to elucidate the ways in which political, social and economic conditions shape and exert authority over the everyday urban, as well as the material and social effects of such dominations. The papers assembled in this Special Feature unite scholars from different disciplines, probing this infrastructural lens to understand the structuring effects of urban temporalities in relation to central issues of contemporary urban development, including urban mobility and transnational migration, the politics of financializing urban infrastructure, urban energy transitions and climate risk. Moreover, thinking through the making of temporal infrastructures-that is, disentangling temporal authorities and their underlying power structures-allows thinking through opportunities for action and political change. In sum, these contributions advance three aims: to strengthen and enrich the analytical notion of infrastructure; to facilitate new knowledge about the construction of present, past and future temporalities; and to unveil potential entry points for social interventions that aim to establish empowering approaches towards urban equality and inclusion.

Routledge eBooks, 2022

Settling and unsettling urban spaces can be understood through analyzing changes in everyday life with a focus on diferent temporalities, occurring through time, paused and accelerated, controlled and contested, cyclical and rhythmic. Time is made permanent through being located in space (Madanipour 2017: 11). In that way "temporary urbanism is based on events that seem to be random, outside the normal rhythm of things, disrupting the settled habits of society and disregarding the routines that regulate everyday life" (ibid.). This section grounds aspects of temporality within subjects, buildings, public spaces, urban developments, cities and states: it explores rights to citizenship in Dubai (Daher, Chapter 10), geographies of aging in Vienna (Gabauer, Chapter 11), relations between maintenance and development of public spaces in London (Wall, Chapter 12), gentrifed neighborhoods in Chicago (Bodnar, Chapter 13), the contested evolution of public libraries in Birmingham (Dring, Chapter 14) and temporalities of property rights in Houston (Cuéllar, Chapter 15). Simple concepts of linear time have been frequently embraced throughout modernist periods because they reduce the complexity of multiple and overlapping everyday rhythms and speeds of cyclical time and moments of rituals into an abstracted and narrow frame of past, present and future timelines. Such constructions of time have been key instruments in preparing the ground for processes of rationalization, optimization and compression of everyday time, erroneously suggesting that productive human activity could be expedited through a quantitative approach to measuring time. Yet everyday time is frst and foremost a felt time, including sensations that mark afective and soulful encounters where relations unfold diferently when characterized by joy or excitement, by sadness or trauma, or if viewed as mere moments of tedium and monotony. Reading unsettled conditions through an analysis of changing patterns of

Ethnos, 2016

Whereas ‘urban’ is usually considered as designating a particular spatial environment composed by the agglomeration of human and non-human elements, the notion of ‘time’ suggests a processual dynamic of rhythms and velocities. However, if we take as a speculative premise that the oxymoronic idea of ‘urban times’ does capture a particular experiential modality, the analytical challenge is obviously to explore what its status might be and how it can be subjected to anthropological examination. In this article, I introduce temporal topographies as an analytical heuristics for examining the oxymoronic constellation ‘urban times’. Taken to constitute partially coordinated complexes of spatio-temporal rhythms, temporal topographies assert themselves as theories that cities make of themselves without being able to totalize the spatio-temporal landscape. It is, however, precisely because they are constantly on the verge of breaking down that temporal topographies give to urban life a particular and awkward potency.

Timescapes of Urban Change , 2019

"This research aims to contribute to debates around the role of time and temporal relations shaping urban redevelopment and urban living. The report brings together insights from a variety of academic disciplines alongside discussions with urban practitioners and community groups. It identifies and examines how different temporal features, such as the temporal constraints and pressures of political and administrative cycles and the different tempos associated with these multiple cycles, affect the planning of cities. The report explores how these temporal dimensions interact with the times inscribed in the built environment by the personal attachments that develop with places through people’s everyday lives and rhythms. These findings stem from my own research projects and reflections gained from my longitudinal study of over 20 years of the regeneration of the neighbourhood of el Raval in Barcelona. Added to these are the insights from the discussions and presentations that were given in two workshops and public events, that took place in London on the 29th of November and in Barcelona on the 12th and 13th of December 2016, as part of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship."

City

Overlapping and interlinked dimensions of time are shaped by and, in turn, structure contemporary urbanization and everyday life. This Special Feature debates the implications of such temporal dynamics for our cities: It explores the making of temporalities, the power relations in and through which this process is embedded, and the inequalities that its effects entail. Beyond definitions that focus on the material characteristics of infrastructures, the Special Feature understands temporalities themselves as infrastructures: structures that underlie and powerfully shape current forms of social organization and interaction. Considering time through this analytic lens promises to elucidate the ways in which political, social and economic conditions shape and exert authority over the everyday urban, as well as the material and social effects of such dominations. The papers assembled in this Special Feature unite scholars from different disciplines, probing this infrastructural lens to understand the structuring effects of urban temporalities in relation to central issues of contemporary urban development, including urban mobility and transnational migration, the politics of financializing urban infrastructure, urban energy transitions and climate risk. Moreover, thinking through the making of temporal infrastructures-that is, disentangling temporal authorities and their underlying power structures-allows thinking through opportunities for action and political change. In sum, these contributions advance three aims: to strengthen and enrich the analytical notion of infrastructure; to facilitate new knowledge about the construction of present, past and future temporalities; and to unveil potential entry points for social interventions that aim to establish empowering approaches towards urban equality and inclusion.

Urban Geography, 2022

The paper deals with temporal aspects of state-led regeneration processes, focusing on a pre-gentrification era in a neighborhood’s lifecycle when various repercussions could follow. Relying on ethnographic research in neighborhood C (“Gimel”) in Beersheba, Israel, the paper joins theorizing efforts from southeastern “ordinary” cities, particularly highlighting the significant role of the state in putatively neoliberal processes. The paper argues that unknown temporal spatialization – the timing, length, and location of development – produce different perceptions of time with regard to urban transformation. Different actors develop a temporal perspective based on their subjective memory, imaginaries, and positioning. The paper offers three timescapes in a place constructed to be on the verge of change: (1) the “above” perspective of planners and municipal actors, patiently envisioning change based on external imaginaries; (2) the “intermediate” perspective of realtors and developers, seeing redevelopment as a nascent on-going process; and (3) the “below” perspectives of residents, either focusing on the decades-long decay or seeing their residency as a transient solution, with present-time longing for rapid change or fear of displacement.

This essay, published as the final chapter in Peter Clark (ed.), Oxford Handbook to Cities in World History (2013), assesses the role that urban development has played in major theories of world history, and analyses the elements of continuity, slow change and dramatic upheaval that are contributing to global urbanisation. This process has become one of humanity's greatest achievements, creating a global web of cities which are 'pulsing with creative organisation and disorganisation - and alive'.