Overview

Cities are typically thought of as permanent. Structures, streets, infrastructure, and other features of the built environment, even if they are periodically replaced, are intended to endure. But temporary, flexible spaces and uses are essential to how cities function and the ways urban dwellers inhabit them. Such adaptability, moreover, is fundamental if cities are to meet the challenges of the future. This book examines temporary urbanisms across varied global contexts, considering their significance for cities and everyday life as well as for policy and practice. It brings together many distinct forms and facets of temporariness and adaptability-from sites of consumption by privileged residents to the survival strategies of marginalized groups-drawing on examples spanning five continents. Lauren Andres explores the driving forces of adaptability as well as the power dynamics and tensions between temporariness and permanence. She highlights how adaptability enhances livability, sustainability, and resilience, showing its importance for addressing crises such as climate change, socioeconomic inequalities, and pandemics. Authoritative and wide-ranging, Adaptable Cities and Temporary Urbanisms reveals why experimentation and creativity are crucial to the present and future of cities.

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9780231208062

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Lauren Andres establishes a compelling framework for understanding how adaptability and temporariness contribute to urban vibrancy, address crises and are fundamental to understanding what makes a city, a city. A must-read for students, scholars and policymakers, Adaptable Cities and Temporary Urbanisms suggests that adaptability and temporariness offer pathways to achieving urban equity, creativity, sustainability and resilience. -- Shauna Brail, author of <i>Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, COVID and Climate Changed Everything </i>

The city is, and will always be, an unfinished project. In this new book, Lauren Andres makes a major contribution to the theory and application of temporary urbanism by setting it within the context of societal change and the power structures that shape our lives today. -- Peter Bishop, coeditor of <i>Design for London: Experiments in Urban Thinking</i> Lauren Andres establishes a compelling framework for understanding how adaptability and temporariness contribute to urban vibrancy, address crises and are fundamental to understanding what makes a city, a city. A must-read for students, scholars and policymakers, Adaptable Cities and Temporary Urbanisms suggests that adaptability and temporariness offer pathways to achieving urban equity, creativity, sustainability and resilience. -- Shauna Brail, author of <i>Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, COVID and Climate Changed Everything </i> Critiquing the inadequacy and rigidity of responses to urban instability and inequality, Andres draws on research on different continents to weave together the concepts of temporary urbanism and adaptability. She makes a persuasive argument for the necessity of creativity and experimentation in urban theory and practice. -- Ali Madanipour, author of <i>Cities in Time: Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City</i>

Author Information

Lauren Andres is director of research and professor of planning and urban transformations at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. She is coeditor of Pandemic Recovery? Reframing and Rescaling Societal Challenges (2024), among other books.

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