Rebranding Precarity

Pop-up Culture as the Seductive New Normal

Ella Harris

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786999825
• eBook ISBN: 9781786999832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Social Sciences

'Pop-up' is a fully-fledged, new urbanism. Celebrated as a flexible and exciting new form of place making, pop-up culture includes temporary or nomadic sites such as cinemas, container malls, supper clubs, even pop-up housing and is now ubiquitous in cities across the world. But what are the stakes of the 'pop-up' city? Traversing a wealth of fascinating case studies, Rebranding Precarity shows how pop-up works to rebrand insecurity and encourages us to embrace precarity as the new normal. Revealing how urban crisis has particular temporal and spatial characteristics, defined by uncertainty, instability, fractures and gaps, it illuminates how those markers of crisis have been optimistically reimagined over the last few years, through an examination of seven logics that rebrand insecurity including within housing, labour economies and gentrifying areas. In doing so, it paints a frightening picture of how crisis conditions have become not just accepted, but are in fact desired, in today's metropolis.

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the pop-up city
• 1 Immersion
• 2 Flexibility
• 3 Interstitiality
• 4 Secrecy
• 5 Surprise
• 6 The micro
• 7 The meantime
• Conclusion: pop-up logics, precarious futures
• References
• Index