The last chapter examined depictions of pop-up’s imaginaries, drawing out how
flexibility, interstitiality, immersion, secrecy and surprise have been identified and discussed by other scholars. This chapter now advances my conceptual approach to pop-up’s imaginaries. As explained in the introduction, my use of the term ‘spatiotemporal imaginaries’, to describe the modes of encounter and orientation that
pop-up generates, follows geographical work on imaginaries and imaginative geographies (Gregory, 1994; Gregory, 1995; Anderson, 1991; Cosgrove, 2008) in order to understand imaginaries as ways of approaching the world that are structured by assumptions about and projections of place. More specifically though, I argue that three particular kinds of orientation are synthesised within pop-up’s imaginaries. Firstly, as spatiotemporal imaginaries, they engage a vision of urban-space time as nonlinear which re-reads precarious urban conditions to make those realities seem desirable. Secondly, pop-up’s imaginaries respond to precarity as a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977), transforming experiences of precarity to give them a positive inflection. And thirdly, they work as compensatory narratives that make palatable the adapted conditions lived in after recession, in a move akin to what Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011). My account, therefore, understands pop-up’s imaginaries as a sort of collection of modes of orientation incorporating multiple ways of experiencing, approaching and understanding the contemporary urban condition.
This approach to imaginaries builds on ways imaginaries have been discussed by other Geographers. Spatiotemporal sensitivities have always been an acknowledged feature of imaginaries which entail a ‘taken for granted spatial ordering’ (Gregory, 2009). This is evident, for example, in how imaginaries of territorial borders function to order political and social life globally (Massey, 2008) or in how containerization inaugurated a vision of the world as a ‘smooth space’ of
homogenized environments (Martin, 2013). My second conjecture, that imaginaries should be thought together with structures of feeling, is perhaps less orthodox. Yet I think that many uses of imaginaries implicitly incorporate structures of feeling. Ben Anderson argues that structures of feeling relate to a ‘”sense”’ in a ‘particular time and place’ (Anderson, 2014, p. 118). We can see this in how the term imaginary is used, for example to describe imaginaries of urban ruination in a place like Detroit (Fraser, Forthcoming), where that imaginary expresses and makes sense of a post- recession structure of feeling that includes shock, grief and fascination at the capacity of urban life to, so suddenly, fall apart. Equally, my suggestion that imaginaries serve as narratives that make sense of changing, often diminished, conditions resonates with accounts of, for example, how imaginaries of empire gave working class Britons an experience of superiority over ‘others’ abroad that
compensated in some sense for the difficulties of life at home (Virdee, 2014) and how imaginaries linked to Brexit might serve a similar purpose in the present day (Bhambra, 2016) structure of feeling of precarity. In these examples we see how imaginaries help to reproduce, but can also make sense of or alter, structures of feeling.
In this chapter I draw together bodies of work that advance my approach to pop-up’s
imaginaries and introduce how I am working with these concepts. The first part is split into two sections and introduces my theoretical approaches to urban space- time, and pop-up’s nonlinear space-time in particular. Part of my argument around the nonlinearity of pop-up space time will be developed in the next chapter, on methodology. There, I argue that, if accounts of imaginaries have often been advanced through attention to their manifestations in particular media, then interactive documentary – as method - can elucidate the workings of the nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginary (Harris, 2016) which I argue is operative in pop-up culture. This chapter sets out a more urban-orientated account of pop-up space-time. In the first section I explore how pop-up’s nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginaries relate to,
and serve to order, the socio-economic conditions of the city. To explore this I work through other accounts of the relationship between space-time and the city. There
is, of course, a huge body of work on this topic but I focus on theories of spatiotemporality that illuminate pop-up as a phenomenon that responds to a disordering of the urban by making that disorder into a new ordering principle. In the second section I build on this literature to advance my conception of pop-up’s own spatiotemporality and its instrumentalities and, in doing so, draw on theories of assemblage and turbulence. In the introduction I suggested that, in the wake of recession, London experienced what could be labelled as ‘turbulence’, a shock to the system that exposes usually invisible infrastructural orderings (Cresswell & Martin, 2012). Here I explore how systems undergoing turbulence reveal their nonlinearity; that is their capacities to be radically otherwise, and detail how pop-up’s imaginaries respond to that. In post-recession London economic turbulence manifested, in part, as high vacancy rates and forestalled development, producing a landscape which reveals the contingency of its normal distributions, which have been undermined by economic crisis. I suggest that pop-up responds to these conditions of turbulence with positively inflected, nonlinear imaginaries; imaginaries that transform uncertainty and instability into flux and ephemerality. Because the methodology chapter develops my theorisation of nonlinearity some of the discussion of core ideas here is relatively brief, intended to introduce this element of my conceptual framework and its relation to the others ideas I work with, before it is advanced in the next chapter.
The second part of this chapter advances my arguments that pop-up’s imaginaries transform precarity as a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) and that they involve
the development of compensatory narratives. I consider precarity as a structure of feeling that many have identified as pervasive in the contemporary condition (Anderson, 2014; Berlant, 2011) as well as exploring other, adjusted, structures of feeling that have been argued to emerge from and relate to precarity including ‘flexibility’ (Anderson, 2014) and ‘austerity chic’ (Bramall, 2011). I consider pop-up’s involvement in these responses to precarity as a structure of feeling, suggesting that its imaginaries transmute experiences of precarity, producing imaginaries through which nonlinearity is understood as a positive and hopeful mode of urban
organisation. That is not to say that precarity as a structure of feeling is thereby
replaced but that, as Anderson argues, multiple structures of feeling and other
orientations to the world can co-exist and function in combination or, indeed, in conflict (Anderson, 2014; Anderson, 2016). Lastly, I advance what is meant by ‘compensatory narratives’ by discussing the identification of such narratives in the work of others and arguing that they can be thought about as what Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011).