Re-imagining Crisis: Pop-up Cultures and Precarious Lives in Austerity London

Londoners today inhabit a period of 'crisis-ordinary' (Berlant, 2011). Under on-going austerity measures, poverty and inequality are rising. The housing crisis is worsening and more people are in precarious employment. It has been argued that this state of crisis is being perpetuated because stakeholders won't entertain solutions that contest the neoliberal model (Elledge, 2017). With this in mind, this project examines efforts at re-imagining precarious conditions to present them positively. Drawing on my existing research, as well as through the development of two new case studies, I will produce a monograph that examines how precarious ways of working and living in London are being branded positively. Specifically, I examine the role of "pop-up" culture in normalising and glamorising precarity.
Pop-up started as a trend for temporary and mobile places of consumption and culture. However, it has expanded to include phenomenon such as pop-up social housing, pop-up legal aid centres, pop-up universities and pop-up health care services. In my PhD I argued that what is important about pop-up is its particular imaginations of urban space and time. Pop-up embraces the idea of a city that is flexible and surprising, that contains secret and "interstitial" (in-between) sites, and that is populated by micro and mobile places. These ways of imagining the city clearly resonate with and appeal to a wide variety of stakeholders, as they are increasingly adopted to promote diverse places, events and services. This project will interrogate the cross-sector celebration of discourses associated with unpredictability, ephemerality, miniaturisation and in-between-ness at a time of widespread precarity, arguing that they have emerged, in part, to rationalize and compensate for instability and insecurity in the city. The monograph will explore how pop-up's discourses positively re-imagine conditions of precarity in contemporary London across four key areas, examined in the monograph's four empirical chapters: precarious labour, gentrification, temporary accommodation in the social housing sector, and 'solutions' to the housing crisis in the private sector. The monograph will be written for a broad audience and targeted at publishers such as Verso, Penguin or Bloomsbury who can disseminate the book within and beyond academia.
As well as the high impact value of the monograph, the Fellowship has two other impact orientated objectives. Firstly, the project will include the organization of a stakeholder workshop, in collaboration with the marketing strategy company 'Truth', which will explore how pop-up's discourses are deployed in different sectors (housing, labour, place rebranding). Invited stakeholder will include developers, architects, members of the Greater London Assembly, local councils and pop-up space management companies. The workshop will generate debate around the impacts of pop-up's discourses and enable my work to influence stakeholders. Secondly, I will develop a multimedia project website to disseminate my findings and ideas throughout the project, as well as to host relevant work and responses from other scholars and interested parties.
The website will be an accessible way for stakeholders and members of the public to engage with the project, as well as a means by which to develop academic and non-academic networks. As well as creating project social media accounts to promote the website I will mobilise my existing networks of scholars within Cultural and Urban Geography, local councils, university and society research groups, scholars of i-Docs and contacts at Guardian Cities to share it via their media accounts. The Methods Lab at Goldsmiths and the SLOM:LAB (both of which Rebecca Coleman has leading roles in) will assist with publicizing and promoting the website as an innovative methodology and impact tool. As in kind support, Truth will promote the website and feature information about my project on their own website.