Book review of Neil Gray’s Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle

Neil Gray (ed), Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-78660-574-0 (cloth); ISBN: 978-1-78660-575-7 (paper); ISBN: 978-1-78660-576-4 (ebook

The seductions of temporary urbanism

In the current discourse of low-budget urbanity, there is a special place for projects and practices of temporary reuse. While the idea of temporary urban uses is often understood as encompassing a highly heterogeneous variety of practices and projects, and defying strict definitions (Bishop and Williams, 2012), the currency in common parlance of terms such as pop-up shops, guerrilla gardens and interim uses bears witness to the existence of a shared imaginary of marginal and alternative temporary practice (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Hou, 2010). It is a complex composite imaginary, which draws upon and is constituted by often radically different and contrasting practices and positions. The differing and at times highly incompatible genealogies are a central component of its allure: ‘temporary reuse’ appears to be a floating signifier capable of encompassing a wide variety of activities and of fitting a broad spectrum of urban discursive frameworks

Notes From the Temporary City: Hackney Wick and Fish Island 2014 - 2015

Notes from the Temporary City takes you on a tour of a neighbourhood on the cusp of change. It provides a complex picture of the dynamics reshaping contemporary London, from the pressure of market forces to new structures of governance and the ingenuity of its residents. Ferreri and Lang's Hackney Wick has the power of synecdoche – it speaks of a wider metropolitan condition where temporary uses are entangled in the desire to both break from capitalist urbanisation and profit from it. Rather than a catalogue of good practices, this book provides something much more compelling and necessary for the analysis of temporary use – a trajectory of disagreements, deviations and paths not taken. Isaac Marrero-Guillamó

Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London

The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hospitality, transport, service industry and housing. While critical debates have focused on the challenges that sharing economy activities bring to existing labour and economic practices, it is necessary to acknowledge that they also have increasingly significant impacts on planning policy and urban governance. Using the case of Airbnb in London, this article looks at how these sharing or platform economy companies are involved in encouraging governments to change existing regulations, in this case by deregulating short-term letting. This has important implications for planning enforcement. We examine how the challenges around obtaining data to enforce new regulations are being addressed by local councils who struggle to balance corporate interests with public good. Finally, we address proposals for using algorithms and big data as means of urban governance and argue that the schism between regulation and enforcement is opening up new digitally mediated spaces of informal practices in cities

Self-precarization and the spatial imaginaries of property guardianship

Property guardianship, a form of short-term building security through temporary dwelling, has emerged in several European countries over the last twenty years. Despite being characterised by tenure insecurity and often substandard conditions, 'living as a guardian' has become a composite and polyvalent mode of inhabiting cities, rooted in the production and dissemination of distinctive spatial imaginaries of 'nomadic' urban dwelling. In the United Kingdom, where guardianship is relatively novel and marginal, the establishment of several intermediary companies has contributed to the rapid diffusion of the scheme as precarious 'adventurous' housing, particularly in metropolitan areas where guardianship schemes largely attract mobile and university-educated individuals. Drawing on debates about the complexities of 'self-precarization' (Lorey, 2006), this article examines imaginaries of property guardianship and their ambivalent significance in relation to lived processes of precarization. Through the analysis of media representations and in-depth interviews with current and former guardians in London, it explores how guardians mobilise narratives of adaptability, flexibility and nomadism, between resignation to existing housing conditions and a sense of critical and autonomous agency. The article proposes and develops a nuanced qualitative approach to analyse how precarious dwelling through guardianship is reshaping spatial imaginaries of acceptable and desirable urban dwelling, and contributing to significant processes of individual and collective subjectification. At a moment of extensive governmentality through insecurity, it concludes that examining imaginaries and practices of self-precarization offers a critical entry point for understanding and rethinking, theoretically and politically, housing precarity and its geographies

The Mediapolis Q&A: Mara Ferreri's The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism and Ella Harris's Rebranding Precarity

The Mediapolis Questions & answers about Mara Ferreri's book 'The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism' and Ella Harris's book 'Rebranding Precarity

Notes from the Temporary City: Hackney Wick and Fish Island 2014-2015

In 2014 Mara Ferreri and Andreas Lang embarked on a year-long investigation of the multiple and contradictory values of temporary projects and spaces in Hackney Wick and Fish Island. The resulting collection of notes, interviews, observations, maps and photographs formed the basis of our co-authored book Notes from the Temporary City: Hackney Wick and Fish Island 2014-2015. In it, we raised questions about a temporary city in the making and discussed cultural capital, the language of policy and planning, the paradoxes of temporariness and the pop-up disquiet felt by many residents and practitioners as the post-Olympic redevelopment plans began affecting the neighbourhood

Digital informalisation: rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk

The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of ‘smart’ technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies

The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London

Temporary urbanism has become an established marker of city making after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of urban practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration and planning. Drawing on seven years of semi-ethnographic research in London, it explores the politics of temporariness at time of austerity from a situated analysis of neighbourhood transformation and wider cultural and economic shifts. Through a sympathetic, longitudinal engagement with projects and practitioners, the book tests the power of aesthetic and cultural interventions and highlights tensions between the promise of practices of dissenting vacant space re-appropriation, and their practical foreclosure. Against the normalisation of ephemerality, it develops a critique of temporary urbanism as a glamorisation of the anticipatory politics of precarity, transforming subjectivities and imaginaries of urban action