Читать книгу Rebranding Precarity - Ella Harris - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIt’s spring 2012 and, typically for England, still cold. Me, an intern and two staff from the fairly recently founded company 3Space shuffle through the oddly deserted market streets of Colchester, Essex. We clutch our coffees tightly, feeling a little unnerved at being this far out of London. ‘I think it’s round this way’, Amy, the senior staff member, says, taking a sharp turn.
The four of us squeeze through a private alleyway, using our shoes to push aside crisp packets and beer bottles that have collected since it’s been disused.
We’re at the back entrance. Amy has the key already. After a couple of goes, she manages to open up. We venture into the dark, chilly corridor: manky carpets, walls in desperate need of a repaint, bathrooms that look like they haven’t seen running water for a while.
In the dingy main room, large floor-to-ceiling windows might be letting in some light and warmth from the high street if they weren’t boarded up. There are huge piles of coat hangers and smaller collections of shelving units, screws and ambiguous items strewn across the floor. The ‘JJB Sports’ signage on the walls is already peeling off a little.
‘Wow’, says Amy, ‘this is going to be a really great space’.
There is broad consensus that we are living in precarious times. The effects of the 2008 financial crash are still being felt globally and have been entrenched and exacerbated since by widespread austerity measures. Inequality is rising, labour insecurity is worsening, and welfare is being continually retracted, leaving millions on the breadline. The housing crisis is also intensifying, especially in major cities of the Global North such as San Francisco or Dublin. Economic insecurity has been coupled with political turbulence, including the capricious presidency of Donald Trump in the US and the chaos ensuing from the UK’s vote to leave the EU. The spectre of the now inevitable, disastrous effects of climate change adds to the picture of volatility and decline. In this context, precarity is a new normal: both a personal, lived experience and a collective ‘structure-of-feeling’, a palpable atmosphere that most of us now inhabit (Anderson, 2014; Berlant, 2011).
In London, as in cities across the world, the effects of the crash were visible in the urban fabric in its aftermath. Buildings and sites were left vacant as businesses shut down and developments ground to a halt. In 2009, 10 per cent of commercial property in the UK capital was empty (Savills World Research, 2014). Boarded-up shops and fenced-off construction sites were visual reminders of the sudden slump in fortunes. At the same time, funding cuts from central and local governments left charities, creative groups and small businesses without capital or opportunities. The now ubiquitous ‘pop-up’ culture emerged from this state of affairs.
Also referred to as ‘meanwhile use’, pop-up was promoted as a way to fill up derelict and empty sites and buildings while also providing free or cheap space to small groups who could ‘animate’ urban areas again. The now well-rehearsed pop-up format involves loaning buildings and sites to users on a short-term basis. Some pop-ups are one-off uses of a given space while others move nomadically between sites as and when they become available. The introduction of the ‘Meanwhile Use Lease Contract’ in 2009 codified this practice and gave owners of vacant properties in the UK exemption from business rates if they loaned their empty premises temporarily to non-profit groups. 3Space, who feature in the vignette above, were one charity that formed, in 2010, ‘as a direct response to the increase in vacant commercial premises brought about by the financial crisis’ (3Space, 2019). They work to manage vacant properties for commercial landlords, bringing in charities that can make use of the spaces on short-term contracts until a long-term occupier is found.
As well as being expedited by the ‘Meanwhile Use Lease Contract’, pop-up placemaking has been promoted by prominent figures and leaders in London. These include the retail consultant Mary Portus and Boris Johnson, currently UK Prime Minister but Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016. Pop-up was heralded by such advocates as both a way to maintain arts and charity activities at a time of cuts and as a stimulus for regeneration during the recession; a method for adding activity to areas struck by decline and in doing so attracting investors back to the disused spaces. Along with 3Space, multiple other intermediary organizations emerged in London to liaise between landlords of vacant properties and potential users. Later, many space management companies also sprung up to take over larger empty sites and curate communities of temporary users.
There have been similar stories of charity groups and start-ups using vacant spaces across many cities struck by the recession. In Athens, notoriously one of the worst affected cities, the platform Polis was set up to encourage ‘citizen led urban regeneration through pop-up activities’, assigning shops and spaces to start-ups or creative groups to keep the city moving amidst the crisis (Cooperative City, 2019). In Michigan, a ‘Center for Community Progress’, established in 2010, helped communities to reuse abandoned properties (Seeds, n.d.). In Dublin, a pop-up park, built using recycled and donated materials, filled an empty site that had been intended for social housing before the crash put a halt to such investments (Cherry, 2017).
In these early days, pop-ups were very definitely compensatory forms of placemaking. Their ad hoc decorative strategies, such as stringing up bunting or turning discarded crates into seating, only thinly veiled the dereliction of the properties they popped up in. Typical pop-up places included charity shops, community projects or volunteer-run services that replaced overstretched or closed-down council provisions, such as HIV testing clinics or temporary community libraries. Anyone could see that this kind of placemaking was a makeshift substitute in the face of an economic failure. Fast forward a few years, however, and London’s pop-up culture had become something quite different …
It’s 2015 and I’m playing with a new feature on Time Out’s website – what they’re calling a ‘pop-up generator’. The description reads:
London is swarming with pop-ups right now. Whether it’s a patisserie in a mechanic’s garage or a lindy-hop contest in a converted ice rink, ‘odd things in odder places’ are, well … popping up all over the place. Want to get in on the action? Keep clicking below to generate your own utterly buzzworthy pop-up ideas. (Time Out, n.d.)
I dutifully click the generator button. I’m offered ‘a vegan greasy spoon … in a vast abandoned warehouse’. I click again: ‘a charity laser-tag tournament … in a repurposed row of garages’. One more: ‘a gin and coffee joint … at a recently shuttered fire station’. These are fictional listings, but they capture the logics of what the pop-up city has become: a heaven of hipster events and establishments, where the repurposing of derelict space is a quirk with cachet, not a marker of decline.
Pop-up is now big business. These days, it’s not even just the purview of hipster subcultures. High-end commercial brands routinely use pop-up as part of their marketing and sales strategies. The cider brand Kopparberg has run extravagant pop-up events in London, including erecting a climbable pop-up mountain complete with real snow and a live DJ. Adidas has taken a pop-up store in the shape of a giant shoebox across cities including Amsterdam and Barcelona. There have even been pop-ups based on well-known TV series, including a highly popular Breaking Bad-themed pop-up ‘cocktail lab’ that has toured London, Manchester, New York and Paris.
From the turbulent aftermath of the 2008 crash, pop-up has emerged as one of the definitive urban cultures of the early twenty-first century. Pop-up uses of vacant space have been heavily promoted in most post-crisis cities. This includes within European countries such as Ireland, Spain and Portugal where, as in the UK, property bubbles in tandem with foreclosure crises have resulted in large amounts of derelict space and abandoned developments (O’Callaghan et al., 2018). It’s also been the case in ‘shrinking’ cities of the US, such as Detroit or Cleveland, where large amounts of demolition and disuse have left space for temporary activities (Schwarz, 2011). Pop-up has taken off in cities with lower vacancy rates too. There is a well-developed pop-up culture in Singapore, for example, and a variety of temporary placemaking activities in Cairo. Here, though, pop-ups tend to take the form of temporary transformations of streets and public spaces rather than longer-term occupations of vacant lots and properties (Brody, 2016; Elrahman, 2016).
Pop-up has evolved in divergent directions in the differing social and political contexts of specific countries and cities. In Ireland, pop-up has remained mostly government- and community-led rather than commercial. It has been heavily encouraged by local and national policies, including through the recent (2019) introduction of taxes on vacant space. In Spain, on the other hand, temporary use has taken on a more radical political inflection, bolstered by left-wing movements in cities such as Barcelona and a socially progressive architecture scene. In Berlin, as in London, the force of creative city discourses and policies has led to subversive temporary placemaking being increasingly drowned out by commodified and government-sanctioned pop-ups and meanwhile uses (Tonkiss, 2013). While different ‘types’ of pop-up are more prevalent in certain cities, London is home to a pretty full spread of pop-up activities. As such, it is both singular, unique in the breadth and extent of its pop-up scene, and prototypical, in that it is at the forefront of global trends across all of pop-up’s current trajectories – spanning entertainment, commerce, charity, community, artistic intervention, housing and welfare.
London pop-ups now include temporary cinemas, shops and malls made from shipping containers, supper clubs and pop-up bars and restaurants, as well as numerous off-beat pop-up events such as those parodied in the Time Out generator: pop-up crazy golf, immersive events that couple virtual reality with classical music, hip-hop brunches, escape rooms, foraging adventure supper clubs held in the woods, and prison-themed cocktail bars. Far from being a niche or alternative culture, such pop-ups are now so mainstream that many deem them vacuous and generic.
More recently, the pop-up branding in London has taken another turn and has been adopted by government to market temporary welfare services. This includes several pop-up emergency housing developments, such as the pioneering PLACE/Ladywell in Lewisham, South London, as well as NHS pop-up clinics, and multiple pop-up libraries that have replaced permanent council libraries shut by cuts. If pop-up, in its early days, was an arena in which charities provided services that replaced retracted state welfare, this compensatory format of service provision is now being mimicked by government itself. However, the prestige of pop-up has become such that pop-up welfare services aren’t read as an ad hoc solution in the face of recession and austerity. The label now has enough cachet that it can be used to promote temporary welfare provision as innovative. Pop-up started as, and primarily remains, an urban phenomenon, driven by the creative communities of cities, yet as the pop-up label becomes more renowned – and used more loosely – some temporary and mobile services in rural areas are being branded as pop-up too. These include temporary welfare services, such as medical services, courts of law, libraries and advice services, that use the mobile and temporary format of pop-up to cater to small and remote communities where there is little funding for permanent provisions.
As pop-up becomes an increasingly routine way of imagining and organizing cities across the world, it is timely and crucial to investigate the stakes of this approach to urban placemaking. This is especially true in a city such as London, where the now trendy and glamorous nature of pop-up culture means its origins in insecurity are easily forgotten. What began as an ad hoc solution in the aftermath of recession is now bleeding beyond its original boundaries and shaping the city in lasting ways, becoming the go-to format for many kinds of urban events and services. Through a focus on London, this book questions the implications of a city governed by the logics of pop-up.
Pop-up is what I would call a ‘compensatory culture’: a second-best solution in a time of turbulence that has, despite its origins in precarity, become widely presented and experienced as an acceptable, even preferable, way of organizing life. As this book will explore, pop-up presents crisis conditions as desirable, rebranding the conditions of precarity. This rebranding means that compensatory ways of living and working are not always straightforwardly experienced as deteriorations, but are approached with enthusiasm and optimism by many people.
Of course, in crisis times, people have always engaged compensatory mechanisms. This can be seen in how homeless families use ad hoc decorative strategies to make compensatory homes in hotel rooms, in how volunteers step up to run libraries closed by funding cuts (Forket, 2017) or how food banks serve as potentially ‘placatory’ devices, a sticking plaster over the withdrawal of welfare support (Cloke et al., 2016). However, most of these compensatory mechanisms are recognized as compensatory. Pop-up, along with many other related post-2008 cultures, is distinctive for having compensatory functions but being branded as aspirational.
To further draw out what I mean by a compensatory culture, it’s worth briefly exploring a couple of other examples. A good illustration is the rise of the ‘mumpreneur’, a term used to characterize women with children who do freelance or self-employed work from home. Such women are celebrated as entrepreneurial and self-determined businesswomen. They tend to work in areas related to domesticity or childcare, making ‘cosy’ products such as luxury domestic goods, food and toiletries, or providing products and services for babies and children (Garrett, n.d.). Mumpreneurs have emerged from a climate of austerity. They have often left public sector roles after being pushed to take redundancy in the wake of cuts. The services they provide can also replace retracted public services, including playgroups or health and well-being advice services for children. Many women have chosen to work from home in this way in order to save childcare costs while still earning a salary while finances are squeezed. Yet this compensatory way of working is presented as aspirational, including by the women themselves who self-promote on social media. As such, the figure of the mumpreneur reclassifies adjustments to diminishments in quality of life that have disproportionally impacted on women as a fulfilling lifestyle choice. While clearly a retrogressive impact of austerity on gender equality, the pushing back of women into domestic environments and childcare roles is narrated as innovative and entrepreneurial. At the same time, the celebration of the middle-class woman juggling work and childcare to ‘do her bit’ to get through austerity also shames other groups of women. For example, the abject figure of the ‘chav’ mum is presented as greedy and irresponsible in contrast to middle-class women who apparently ‘find ingenious ways to provide for their families rather than relying on state handouts’ (Garrett, n.d.).
The shaming of lower-income groups is often a feature of compensatory cultures. At a time when inequality is rising, bringing issues of class identities and divisions back to the foreground, compensatory cultures can make middle-class people feel better about their own worsening situations while shaming, and also exacerbating, the hardships of those less well off. As well as in the normative ideals of mumpreneurship, this can be seen in the rise of ‘austerity chic’ as the key aesthetic of several compensatory cultures. Since 2008, there has been a revival of wartime slogans such as ‘keep calm and carry on’ and ‘make do and mend’, as well as a promotion of making and consumption cultures associated with 1930s–1950s austerity, such as craft, sewing, cooking and growing (Hall & Holmes, 2017). At a time when disposable incomes are squeezed, this revival repositions cheaper ways of living as aspirational. TV celebrity Kirstie Allsopp has become a key figurehead for the ‘make do and mend’ mentality, presenting thrift as creative and enjoyable. These thrifty cultures are glamorized via a romanticized version of historical wartime austerity cultures, encouraging people to adopt the same (imagined) attitude of stoic resourcefulness in the face of today’s austerity measures (Bramall, 2013, p. 20). Again, this rebranding of thrift reimagines hardships of austerity as pleasurable while working to shame those experiencing more severe poverty. The celebration of middle-class families saving a few pounds by cunningly reusing leftovers or making their own clothes implies that those struggling to get by are just not being crafty enough.
Compensatory cultures, while they emerge from a crisis in neoliberal capitalism, serve to naturalize its failures while perpetuating its ideologies. For example, recession-era fashion blogs perpetuate the ‘fantasy of [clothes] shopping’ while reframing fashion consumption as a frugal activity. Such blogs make fashion seem ‘less frivolous and more useful’ because they are written by ‘real’ ‘every-day girls’ and framed around resourcefulness and ‘cost consciousness’ (Nathanson, 2014, pp. 137–139). The figure of the ‘recessionista’ was used ‘by the fashion industry to identify and target an audience it regarded as rightfully fearful about spending in such an economically unstable climate’ and encourage their continued consumption by defining this figure as ‘a careful shopper who does not abandon consumer culture altogether in the light of the global recession’ (Nathanson, 2014, p. 139). Importantly, then, while compensatory consumption cultures promote frugality, they position the truly responsible recession-era citizen as one who finds cunning ways to keep spending by making personal sacrifices and alterations.
Pop-up has a lot in common with the other compensatory cultures explored above. It developed because usual, preferred ways of living had failed and yet quickly became fashionable to consumers as well as appealing to stakeholders. Its aspirational presentation allows people disenfranchised by recession and austerity to invest meaning and enjoyment in what remains available to them, and in turn allows neoliberal capitalism to continue unquestioned despite no longer yielding its promised results for the majority. Pop-up’s origins in recession are now often forgotten as it is positioned as a fashionable kind of placemaking that can transform urban sites and add dynamism to high streets. The shipping container malls archetypal of pop-up placemaking are a clear example of the compensatory, yet glamorized, nature of pop-up culture. Containers have, across the years, been ‘prisons for the poor’ – used as detention centres, jails and vessels for refugees (Boyel, 2016). In pop-up culture, containers were initially enlisted because they are cheap and fast to erect on land that needs immediate regeneration and/or is only temporarily available (Martin, 2016). This is seen, for example, in how containers were used for the Re:START Mall erected in Christchurch after the commercial centre was destroyed by an earthquake in 2011. Now, though, container malls have acquired a ‘cult status’ (Slawik et al., 2010), no longer just used for their practical values in emergency conditions and uncertain times, but also for their cultural cachet. The insecurity and temporariness that containers could signal is replaced with a more positive imagination of flexibility, dynamism and creativity.
In short, pop-up makes crisis conditions feel fun. As such, it encourages people to invest enthusiasm in practices that, ironically, normalize and thereby perpetuate their own precarity. This book will explore how pop-up culture acclimatizes people to precarity, realigning perceptions and expectations so that insecure ways of living and working can be embraced. If precarity is the dominant structure of feeling in the contemporary era, then pop-up culture generates affects of enthusiasm, optimism and adventure that mediate and transform what might otherwise be an overwhelming atmosphere of precarity, producing more positive experiences that make crisis conditions bearable, but in doing so also make them durable.
My use of the term ‘compensatory’ is inspired by the sociologist Fran Tonkiss’ description of how makeshift creative places in the post-crisis city can offer ‘a kind of compensatory or diversionary urbanism in the face of political retreat and economic recession’ (Tonkiss, 2013, p. 6). Important in Tonkiss’ description is the alignment of the compensatory with the diversionary. Rather than being recognized as deteriorations, these are cultures that distract from precarity by offering a diversion that to some degree muffles its effects. True to both meanings of the word ‘diversion’, these cultures must therefore be, at least to some degree, appealing and enjoyable.
Like other compensatory cultures, pop-up also mediates the remaking of class divisions in the recession/austerity era. While it allows mostly middle-class people to find meaning and value in precarious ways of living and working, it can exacerbate precarity for the working classes, especially by worsening gentrification and pushing poorer residents further out of the city. This dynamic is evident in the Time Out pop-up generator. In the generator’s fictional pop-ups – a vegan greasy spoon in a vast abandoned warehouse, a charity laser-tag tournament in a repurposed row of garages, and a gin and coffee joint at a recently shuttered fire station – the spaces being used are ex-industrial or otherwise symbolic of the grittiness of the urban. Abandoned warehouses, garages and closed-down fire stations are spaces that used to be functional, rather than primarily aesthetically or culturally interesting, and which tend to belong to geographies of working-class labour. Contrastingly, the pop-up places occupying them are affiliated with young middle-class, ‘hipster’ culture and tastes (veganism, gin and coffee drinking, and adult play activities). The Time Out generator’s imagined pop-up city is one where working-class spaces are ‘repurposed’ by hipster activities; as such, it points emphatically towards pop-up’s part in gentrification.
While the pop-ups from the Time Out generator are not real events, the same contradiction between the demographic targeted by the pop-up and the people who might have used a space previously is apparent in many real pop-ups. These include Hackney Hardware, a gin bar in a closed-down hardware store in Hackney, and The Convenience, a pop-up restaurant in a public toilet in Homerton. This kind of repurposing is most clearly politically insensitive in the case of The Job Centre, which, while not a pop-up, involves many of the same worrying sentiments and consequences. The Job Centre is a bar in a closed-down jobcentre in the gentrifying area of Deptford in South East London; it attracted much adverse attention for the way it fetishized and parodied working-class culture for the amusement of middle-class newcomers to the area while contributing to gentrification and pushing those who would have once used the jobcentre further out of the city.
This kind of fetishization of working-class culture is known as ‘class tourism’, which the online Urban Dictionary defines as ‘The act of deriving pleasure or amusement from the customs, mannerisms, and behaviour of people of lower social class’ (Urban Dictionary, 2019). In pop-up culture, class tourism manifests mostly in the practice of marketing middle-class sites of consumption by presenting certain spaces as ‘unusual’ – where unusual basically means a space a middle-class person wouldn’t normally go to (such as a jobcentre or a public toilet). Class tourism in the post-crash context is another compensatory culture. Middle-class people are themselves being displaced to more peripheral and run-down areas of cities by the rising costs of housing. In this context, class tourism helps to brand such areas as ‘interesting’ and ‘quirky’. This in turn allows the middle classes to identify themselves as being present in these areas of deprivation ironically or ludicly rather than as a result of their own precarity. This eases reductions in quality of life for the middle classes while reasserting class distinctions and worsening the situation for others.
While its prominence in the city is increasing, pop-up is also gaining a poor reputation among critics. It is seen by many as insensitive and mercenary in its glamorization of – and generation of profit from – precarious conditions. This is well illustrated by a dark joke made by the comedian and writer Mark Steel in a satirical thought piece on the Grenfell Tower tragedy, a devastating fire in a West London tower block in 2017 that saw 72 people lose their lives, and which was widely blamed on the government’s failure and disinterest in providing safe housing for council tenants. The piece, entitled ‘Crazy Marxists want to give homes to Grenfell survivors – but thankfully we live in a fair capitalist society’ (Steel, 2017), parodies the attitudes of Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen who labelled Labour leader Jeremey Corbyn’s suggestion that survivors be housed in empty properties as ‘hard Marxist’. In the tag line for the piece, Steel jests darkly that ‘It’s the same with those communists who went down with blankets and food. They should have set up a pop-up bedding and hot chocolate store to tap into extensive market opportunities’ (Steel, 2017). Here, pop-up is used to signal the epitome of capitalist inhumanity as an ideology that sees opportunities for profit in a context of dire crisis.
Culture has always been the ground in which social changes are experienced and contested (Cosgrove & Jackson, 1987) and in which social relations and identities are structured (Bennett et al., 2009; Hall & Jefferson, 1991). Compensatory cultures today, and pop-up cultures in particular, are key arenas where meanings are being renegotiated in the post-crisis landscape. Importantly, this book will show how pop-up works to restore and perpetuate neoliberal values and identities in an era of turbulence. Many have noted with bemusement the desire, in the post-2008 context, to carry on with business as usual (Bramall, 2013; Davies, 2018; Whyman, 2014). It seems we would rather ‘keep calm and carry on’ or, more vacuously, ‘keep calm and eat a cupcake’ (Whyman, 2014) than acknowledge the radical failure of the neoliberal capitalist system. Anger and fear are often cited as the emotions driving complicity with systems that reproduce precarity. It’s argued that these negative emotions can be mobilized by government and stakeholders, leading people to blame crisis and austerity on welfare claimants and immigrants, and therefore not engage with systemic causes. However, it is clear that precarity is also accepted and perpetuated through positive emotions, through investments of hope and enthusiasm in cultures that compensate for crisis conditions. In exploring pop-up culture, we will see how the logics of pop-up rebrand precarity as desirable so that rather than fixing the precarity produced by the crash, we forget that these ever were crisis conditions at all.
Under capitalism, there will always be diversionary and compensatory mechanisms. Capitalism is premised on choice, so its maintenance requires people to feel like they are, at least to some extent, choosing the conditions they live under. In hard times, when choices are in fact very limited, compensatory and diversionary mechanisms work to restore people’s sense that the ways they are living and working are desirable and optional. Long prior to the current financial crisis, there have been compensatory cultures that divert from the problematic mechanisms of capitalism and exhausting ways of living under it. There is a long lineage of thought on the role of culture in disseminating and maintaining dominant political ideologies in the face of unpalatable working and living conditions. This includes Marx’s well-known proclamation of religion as an ‘opium of the people’, a diversion from conditions that would otherwise be untenable, as well as similar assertions about culture made by mid-twentieth-century cultural theorists, including Adorno, Horkheimer and Barthes. However, contemporary compensatory cultures such as pop-up are distinctive in that their primary mechanism is of rebranding declining conditions rather than distracting from them.
Some contemporary compensatory cultures do, as Marx argues of religion, function by distracting people from harsh conditions with a kind of ‘illusionary happiness’. For example, Jamie Hakim has explored how gym culture and a fixation on muscularity offer a distraction from dwindling career prospects and squeezed disposable incomes for middle-class white men (Hakim, 2016). And like Barthes’ cultural ‘myths’ in the 1950s, compensatory cultures also naturalize historically constructed concepts that are instrumental in a particular socio-economic setting. We can see this, for example, in how the ‘austerity chic’ aesthetic glamorizes thrift through allusion to wartime practices in order to naturalize contemporary austerity measures (Bramall, 2013). However, most compensatory cultures, and certainly most of pop-up’s logics, function not through distraction from dire conditions, as Marx argues of religion, but by rebranding those conditions themselves. If twentieth-century culture still promoted and advertised ‘unattainable’ goods, even in wartime, ‘merely to keep industrial power in view’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997, p. 162), then, conversely, compensatory cultures promote the ways of living that do seem attainable in crisis times. For example, while ‘fancy decorations’ within ornamental cooking diverted attention from the unaffordability of expensive meals during hard times in the twentieth century, compensatory food cultures glamorize cheaper cooking methods (Barthes, 1972, p. 79). Distraction and displacements of enthusiasm are elements of contemporary compensatory cultures, but the dominant compensatory mechanism is resignification – an overlaying of positive imaginaries onto reduced circumstances.
Attempting to perpetuate faith in the vanishing comforts of pre-crash life, post-crash cultures reassure us that nothing has fundamentally changed, despite stark evidence to the contrary. Connectedly, if twentieth-century cultures kept people working in systems that repressed them but generally speaking functioned on their own terms and for particular elite groups, compensatory cultures belong to an era of ‘zombie capitalism’. They keep people attached to what are arguably ‘dead systems walking’ by naturalizing the failure of those systems – for example, by maintaining the primacy of aspirational consumerism while reimagining ideal consumption as involving thrift and frugality.
In positioning pop-up as a compensatory culture, I don’t want to claim that its only function is to normalize precarity and keep people attached to a faltering capitalist system. As we will see across the chapters, there’s space within pop-up culture for possibilities to be opened up for less precarious and more ethical ways of living and working, and certainly pop-ups play a key role in sustaining important community projects and services at times of crisis. The pop-up format has been mobilized to provide youth centres at times when permanent facilities have been closed, including in Chicago in the US and London in the UK. In Pop Brixton, a pop-up container mall in South London, a community fridge has been set up where people and businesses can leave spare edible food for those in need. Pop-up’s can be progressive spaces that enrich marginalized communities. For example, at a time when gentrification is threatening gay districts, queer pop-ups are creating spaces that are more directly inclusive of non-cisgender and non-white queer people (Stillwagon et al., 2018). However, compensatory cultures are not in essence resistive, even if they are akin to resistive countercultures in that they respond to precarity and offer ways through it. They may contain resistive elements and potentials, but overall I argue that they foster acceptance of, rather than resistance to, dominant political and economic systems. Equally, as we’ll see, the format of pop-ups, as temporary and provisional spaces, means they run into problems when trying to provide lasting relief from precarity. This is because any success that pop-ups have in alleviating conditions can then be used to justify those reliefs remaining temporary and provisional, rather than structural to the city’s systems, as that success is attributed to pop-up’s temporary nature. As long as this is the case, the constructive ways of thinking and acting enabled by pop-ups will struggle to expand beyond the interstices of an urban order that prioritizes profit.
Precarity rebranded: pop-up logics
In the chapters that follow, we’ll examine some of the key logics of pop-up culture and explore how they compensate for and rebrand precarious ways of living and working in contemporary London. As this introduction has suggested, pop-up culture is a global phenomenon and the book’s arguments are relevant to cities across the world. My focus, however, is tracing how pop-up has played out in the particular context of London, including by considering it in the light of London- and UK-specific events and issues, such as the Grenfell Tower tragedy or Britain’s exit from the EU. This focus reflects a belief that while it’s possible to draw broad conclusions about pop-up culture, which I certainly do, it’s also important to be attentive to how its functions and its stakes manifest the context of particular cities.
When I say I will explore pop-up’s ‘logics’, what I mean by this is the patterns in thinking and feeling that pop-up produces and encourages. I’m interested in how pop-up imagines the city and what those imaginations achieve in this socio-economic and political climate. Traversing case studies across London, I will introduce seven logics that are central to how pop-up sees and produces urban space and time. These are: immersion, flexibility, interstitiality (in-between-ness), secrecy, surprise, the micro and the meantime. Each chapter looks at one of these logics and examines how it works to normalize and/or glamorize precarity in London’s leisure, labour and housing cultures. While each logic is discussed in relation to a particular type of pop-up – for example, I discuss immersion in relation to pop-up cinemas and the meantime in relation to pop-up housing – they each work across the various areas of pop-up culture. I separate them out for simplicity, but they are not stand-alone logics – their force over the city comes from how they operate in combination. The seven logics I focus on are chosen as those most pervasive to London’s pop-up culture, as determined by my own research. This is not to say that they’re an exhaustive list. There are some that I see as subsidiary to larger logics, as interactivity is to immersion, ad hocism is to interstitiality, or singleness is to the micro – many of which I explore in the context of the more primary logics. There are other logics that pervade pop-up but don’t, strictly speaking, belong to it, such as sharing (as in the sharing economy), that I draw on in my analysis but don’t attempt to examine exhaustively, given they function so much more widely than in pop-up alone. I’ve also honed in on the logics most central to pop-up’s own self representations, given that it is those which are most powerfully pushed into public discourse.
The seven logics explored also show how pop-up’s rebranding of precarity works predominantly by reimagining the spatial and temporal features of crisis. Urban crisis has particular spatiotemporal characteristics, defined by uncertainty, instability, fractures and gaps. This book illuminates how those markers of crisis have been optimistically reimagined by pop-up culture, whose logics rebrand insecurity within housing, leisure and labour economies, and in gentrifying areas. Pop-up replaces, for example, instability with ‘flexibility’ or diminishment with ‘the micro’ so that the impacts of the crash on urban space and time are felt differently than they might otherwise be. For David Harvey, socio-economic and political upheavals go hand in hand with upheavals in how space and time are distributed and imagined (Harvey, 1990). For example, the experience of time–space compression generated by globalization is, for Harvey, definitive of the postmodern condition, reflecting changing technologies and economic structures and instigating tangible changes in how places are felt and perceived. This kind of upheaval is what I think we see in pop-up culture as a phenomenon of the post-2008 era; pop-up is symptomatic of the disruption of spatial and temporal orders by the crash. However, it is also instrumental in shaping the ways we see and experience those changes.
While pop-up culture is a new phenomenon and marks an intensification of instability and uncertainty after 2008, many elements of it have long urban lineages. There have always been temporary and mobile places in cities, from squats to ice cream vans. There have also long been ad hoc and nomadic ways of working, and makeshift and impermanent sites of leisure, such as market work and fairgrounds. What’s new about pop-up culture isn’t necessarily its formats, but the way that it imagines and narrates those formats in relation to conditions of urban volatility. Clearly, these imaginations and narratives are powerful and resonate with a wide variety of stakeholders, given the rapidity with which pop-up has become a pervasive kind of placemaking. It’s for this reason that I place so much importance on understanding the logics of pop-up; its logics are what hold the key to understanding its ever-growing influence.
As I’ve outlined, the compensatory origins of pop-up culture are rapidly being forgotten. Attention to pop-up culture’s logics and their implications is therefore pertinent. Before its ways of thinking about the city become fully naturalized, it’s important to question their impact, remember their origins, reassert their contingency, and examine whether the ever-advancing pop-up city is a place we want to live.
