Temporary Urban Spaces

[Image: Cover and contents of Temporary Urban Spaces. Photograph by JJ Yeo. All copyrights of book belongs to their respective owners]

TEMPORARY URBAN SPACES: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces
Edited by Florian Haydn, Robert Temel.
Published by Birkhauser.

ISBN-10: 3-7643-7460-8
ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-7460-0

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New approaches to the planning and the use of public and private space have begun to spring up in cities the world over. Here, the spotlight is no longer on the master plan, or the making of long-term arrangements. Instead, the ephemeral, trial and error, and the unplanned are gaining legitimacy in many cities the world over. Temporary uses are both indicators of this development and beneficiaries of a new way of seeing.

This not-so-temporary journey (it gets quite wordy) starts off with a brief definition index, exploring the meanings and implications of words and issues like the temporality versus the temporal nature of such events. Strategies, as long term solutions, are compared to tactics, as short term guerrilla solutions, which are aimed at achieving a certain short term goal in a given period of time, maybe in hope for permanent deployment in the future.

Covering the use of temporary spaces in the urban context, this volume features 10 essays from 10 experts on the topic, supported by 35 fully photographed sample projects that have been instrumental in establishing temporary use of city spaces of late, in the United States and Europe. Not so much a coffee table read, Temporary Urban Spaces seems more a useful glossary of examples from which to take reference from.

Singapore’s very own local creative-collective, otherwise known as FARM, would have been a worthy addition to this collection of temporary use projects, with their ongoing series of ROJAK events; currently running a “Save the Modern Buildings” series where ROJAK proceedings are held at a different ‘endangered building’ each time, to raise the awareness that architectural icons of the city’s past are fast disappearing in lieu of the ongoing construction boom.

Read this book, and I dare say you’ll be getting creative with your own HDB void deck sooner than you can say ‘Temporary’.

S$68.90

Available at Basheer Graphicbooks
#04-19 Bras Basah Complex
Block 231 Bain Street
Singapore 180231

www.basheergraphic.com
Email: enquiry@basheergraphic.com

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JJ is the co-founder of 5ft Creatives and he is now a legal alien in the USA