Book review: The Temporary City

The Temporary City by Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams

Published by Routledge, January 2012

The Temporary City is a welcome addition to the literature on planning and regeneration – whilst written independently of the recent Mary Portas review of Britain’s high streets, the book deals, from a different direction, with many similar issues affecting our cities. Coming from authors with a practical grounding in the issues of design, planning and delivery it is a particularly valuable and informed contribution to the debate on the future of our cities.

The book questions the need for permanent uses and solutions for sites and argues that we need to increasingly look for short and medium term uses, rather than obsess about the long term; realistically it will take a long time for the economy to achieve stable and meaningful growth and for sites to become viable again – especially with what was paid for many sites at the market peak – and in the meantime these same sites will lie vacant for many years without an effective framework for their interim use.

So if ‘temporary is the new permanent’ then we need to share experience on what makes these ad hoc uses work. As well as the views and opinions expressed in the book, the choice of case studies are well selected and informative and demonstrate what can be achieved with foresight and pragmatism. They show that we can learn much from overseas, where temporary uses are more often celebrated.

Whilst in the UK we have many famous (and infamous) examples of temporary artwork and installations, from the annual Serpentine Gallery to Banksy’s street art, the notion of temporary uses is sadly still not mainstream. The book aims to raise the profile of shorter term solutions by exploring these issues in more detail – seeking to attract a wider audience amongst landowners, developers and planners in the UK, rather than simply the pioneering few.

The book is also keen to argue that temporary uses are not just about one-off initiatives but, crucially, about embedding important principles of temporary use into placemaking and regeneration at the city level. It begins to draw links between successful cities and instances of effective use of temporary regeneration programmes.

Inevitably, with limited research in this field the book can only go so far and is a reminder that we need to start collecting data now so that we can measure improvements in the years to come.

Another area where the book could perhaps go further is exploring the links between grassroots organisations and temporary uses. It is accepted that the government’s Big Society is a relatively new concept, but community-based organisations and activists have been engaged in temporary use creation for many years. This is arguably the genesis of the concepts explored in the book and these links could be drawn out further – essentially to ensure that decision-makers understand that these groups need to be worked with and empowered or else we may simply see sterile and unsuccessful attempts at temporary uses which lack the dynamism the authors are so passionate about. These ingredients are extremely difficult to replicate, particularly at the city level, and this book does a huge amount to explain the importance of why this is important to do, if it does not entirely explain how it can be achieved.